2022: A Year of Progress Towards a Decentralized Future

2022 was quite the year for SSI, as attention to decentralized identity and Web 3.0 continued to grow all through the year.
One of the tenets of Web 3.0 is the idea of managing your identity. The concept is that people will be able to safely store digitized documents and verifiable identity information from different sources in their digital identity wallets.
Instead of having your identity tied to an email address or a social media account controlled by a big tech company, you can have one or more Decentralized identifiers (DIDs) that identify you, created and updated entirely by you, using whatever infrastructure you prefer. You control which information is shared with whom since you own this wallet and everything in it.

One of the remarkable steps towards the widespread adoption of self-sovereign identity was the approval of decentralized identifiers as an official recommendation by the W3C.

With this development, several projects are presently being developed that would make it possible to use DIDs in decentralized applications (and beyond).

For Veramo, which is a public good and open-source project, the year was a turning point, not just for our team but also for the multitude of great engineers who joined our community. We appreciate you for being a part of this amazing community and for making some of our favourite experiences from this year possible.

About Veramo

Veramo is a framework derived from the uPort project that provides a set of tools and libraries for developers to create and manage Decentralized Identifiers and work with Verifiable Credentials.

Veramo allows developers to easily create and verify credentials, such as digital certificates, badges, and degrees, that can be selectively disclosed by individuals. Veramo is an open-source project that is free to use and modify, making it an attractive option for developers who want to incorporate verifiable credentials and decentralized identity into their own applications.

Backed by an amazing community of developers, researchers, and enthusiasts, we’ve been able to build Veramo into what it currently is:

Here’s a summary of the key milestones and achievements of the framework from the past year, including new features and capabilities.

The Veramo codebase has gained quite a few features:

• Simplified credential verification API
  — Including the ability to override certain verification policies
• Added support for Data Integrity (JSON-LD) proofs for credentials and presentations, supporting:
  — EcdsaSecp256k1RecoverySignature2020
  — Ed25519Signature2018 & Ed25519Signature2020
  — JsonWebSignature2020
• Added EthereumEIP712Signature2021 support
• Implementations for managing did:ion and did:pkh identifiers
• Ability to use web3 wallets as KeyManagementSystems
• Added a JSON-based data storage alternative for use in pure JS environments

Community

One of our goals for Veramo is to build a community around it, with people using its modularity and extensibility to build other protocols and tools, either by contributing code to the Veramo codebase or sharing insights and highlights with others. Many of these would not have been possible without the effort of some of our community members.

Most of the interesting novelties recorded within our community are some applications and SDKs built using Veramo as a base layer.

Anyone can simply start using Veramo without our knowledge or permission (which is exactly how it should be), but some folks came back and told us about it, and also significantly improved Veramo on their way:

• BlockchainLabs:UM built a Metamask snap using Veramo to manage DAO reputation using SSI
• Sphereon built an SDK by extending Veramo in so many ways leading to a very powerful SSI solution
• Spherity adopted Veramo for their projects and has made great strides on the revocation side of credential management.
• Cheqd based their SDK on Veramo to be able to get to business without reimplementing all the protocols

If your project uses or enhances any of the modules we’ve built so far, it would make sense to add them to this list of awesome projects.

We were present at a couple of events too:

For the first time, our team was present at the Internet Identity Workshop (IIW35), which took place in Mountain View, USA. We were represented by some members of the Veramo team (the Consensys Mesh ID team) — Nick Reynolds, Simonas Karuzas, and Italo Borssatto.

We had the opportunity to meet with various other people building decentralized identity solutions, as well as members of our community. Nick from our team held a session “DID Method Battle Royale”, and we also got a chance to share a demo of Veramo with the attendees.

We were at DevCon Bogota as well, represented by Italo Borsatto, SSI evangelist at Veramo, alongside, other Consensys Mesh folks.

A couple of community activities were introduced since the start of the year, which includes;

• Creating and running our first bounty program to support developers who contribute to the framework
• Introducing the contributor appreciation spotlight for members of our community.
• Leading some conversations in the community and providing support for products built with the framework through our community call, and Twitter Space events.

A look ahead to the future

As we look ahead to the next year and beyond, we are excited about the potential for our project to continue to grow and evolve.

On our road ahead we see more community involvement, contribution and even ownership of the veramo framework. Since Veramo is so extensible, this aspect could almost be ignored, as anyone can already create plugins and not rely on any of the ones provided by our team. But, there is also extraordinary power in having a batteries-included framework to start you off on the SSI journey, so having a common place for all the necessary features makes sense.

We’ve got plenty on our roadmap: Storage model upgrades, improved documentation, using verifiable credentials in smart contracts, lots of improvements to the API, new DID methods, new key management solutions, messaging upgrades and, of course, integrations with lots of other wonderful projects being built in this space.

We are grateful for the support and contributions of our community so far and would like to take this opportunity to thank each and every one of you for your invaluable contributions. Whether you are a developer who has contributed code, a user who has provided feedback and suggestions, or a supporter who has helped spread the word about our project, we are grateful for your involvement and support. Thank you, and here’s to another successful year🥂.

If you’re curious about integrating Veramo into your project, come chat with us in our Discord.

Shoutout to Mircea Nistor for contributing to this article 🙌🏼 Follow us on Twitter to read more about our updates.