Introduction into Decentralized Identity

I got a new job more than four months ago. I was laid off from my previous company. I was very lucky! I found my new job before my last day in previous company. I am happy because it’s an early stage startup with focus in future technologies. It means that I can do what I love to do most, learning. But, in a commercial company, any learning has to have a purpose. It has to have impact on company’s profitablility, directly or indirectly.

But, if everything is truly about profit, the founders should probably open a grocery store and sells rice and vegetables instead. They don’t. They want to do digital business. They choose the valuable things they want to sell to their customers. So, my job should be about amassing these valuable things. For me, it’s deep knowledge in the domain we want our products to build upon. That domain is "decentralized digital identity".

I also believe in "fake it until you make it" principle. It’s okay if our early products aren’t perfect and only partially works. We want to know as early as possible if our customers really love our products and want to pay for it. If they do, we can build on top of it. We should never forget our end goals. We have to do our work as if our product will be released next month or even next week. We should be customer focused since the beginning.

Few months ago, we evaluated three libraries we want to use to bootstrap our products. They are:

Long story short, we picked Aries. It’s almost a tie with Veramo. But, we especially choose Aries because it has some qualities that we like:

However, Aries is not perfect. It comes with its own troubles:

I ended up writing our code from scratch. I took a lot of inspiration from Aries Framework. But, this complicated beast makes it much easier to develop our own solution rather than writing codes that can be plugged into it.

I learned a lot from Aries. They do have an awful code. But, I increasingly gain new understanding about DID and Verifiable Credential in the last four weeks. This is what I love most about Aries, its learnability. Without using it as a reference, we will be like a tourist in unfamiliar city who trust his guts instead of Google Maps. He said, "Google Maps isn’t always correct!". Well, …​ . At least, we can trust that Aries will behave correctly! Their developers are decentralized identity pioneers and experts. Yes, we write our own code. So, it’s more like a tourist using a Google Maps instead of following itinerary by a travel agent from the city.