Self-sovereign identity (SSI) has largely developed and matured thanks to the rich conversations at the semi-annual Internet Identity Workshop (IIW)—one of the most important user-centric digital identity events on earth. Not only does IIW act as a place to iron out specs and bring communities together, but it acts as a forcing function for implementors to demonstrate the solutions they’ve built over the last six months. IIW’s unique focus on community drives vendors to emphasize interoperability in their demonstrations.
With IIW #31 starting this morning, it’s the perfect time to reflect on how IIW continues to be a part of the interoperability story of the SSI community.
Trinsic's interoperability story
Interoperability has always been of paramount importance to Trinsic. That story begins at an IIW #28 demo with the Government of British Columbia where we demonstrated the first mobile app and enterprise SSI platform to comply with the Hyperledger Aries RFCs, achieving interoperability with the open source ariescloudagent-python. This was the first time two separate codebases demonstrated true interoperability.
Since then, the Trinsic Wallet has been a standard tool for Aries developers to test the agents they’re building. In the Aries community, Trinsic became a leader of interoperability efforts, helping others debug when their implementations didn’t work with our wallet. In our view, spending time helping others in the community achieve interoperability was time well-spent.
But this ad-hoc interoperability testing done via direct messages in RocketChat wasn’t scalable. As the number of Aries-based implementations grew, so too did the burden of maintaining and promoting interoperability. We are happy to say that only three IIW’s after the community’s first display of interoperability, a growing group of SSI vendors have convened to collaborate and hold each other to a high standard of interoperability through the formalization of vendor-to-vendor solution testing.
Formalizing interoperability between vendors
We are proud to work with the tremendous teams in our community to formalize vendor-to-vendor solution testing according to test suites and interoperability profiles in the Technical Stack Working Group at the Trust over IP (ToIP) Foundation. This group has been meeting weekly for several months, and we look forward to this group continuing to improve the interoperability requirements.
Meeting weekly for the last several months, we’ve formally tested the Trinsic platform with the products developed by the following projects. That means any developer that uses the Trinsic platform—including Trinsic’s APIs, Trinsic Studio, and the Trinsic Wallet—will inherit interoperability with solutions built using the following products:
If you plan on attending IIW #31 this week, be sure to attend the session on ToIP interoperability profiles to learn more. As always, we encourage other vendors to join the cause with us so that three IIW’s from now, we will see dozens of interoperable SSI implementations that comply with the ToIP interoperability profiles.
Future interoperability efforts
Our current and future interoperability efforts expand beyond the amazing work happening at the ToIP Foundation. We’re actively engaged in developing next-generation technologies including new zero-knowledge proof capabilities at the Decentralized Identity Foundation (DIF), support for additional DID methods, and W3C compliant JSON-LD credentials. We will be leading a session this week at IIW #31 on some of our next-generation interoperability efforts, so stay tuned!
Our interoperable product stack
Each of Trinsic’s products are powered by the same interoperable core. With the Trinsic Studio, Trinsic Wallet, or our developer platform of 3 APIs, robust documentation, and SDKs in popular languages, your team can rest assured your implementation is powered by a company that prioritizes interoperability.
- Trinsic Studio: An easy-to-use web interface for managing credential exchange with no code. Also serves as the mechanism to acquire API keys and manage billing for paid plans. Try it for yourself completely free, and issue a credential in less than 5 minutes!
- Provider API: Our newest API enables developers to programmatically provision issuer and verifier cloud agents. Learn more about the provider API in the recent launch announcement.
- Credentials API: Our core API enables developers to have a turnkey way to issue, verify, and manage verifiable credentials on any Hyperledger Indy network. Check out our documentation or one of our reference applications to get started.
- Wallet API: An API for creating and managing cloud wallets on behalf of credential holders. It’s the backend of our Mobile SDK, which you can read more about in our recent post about building your own SSI wallets. Get started with the API by checking out the documentation.
Focusing on interoperability has been at Trinsic’s core since we began, because we want to ensure that verifiable credentials are as accessible and useful as possible to people everywhere. Making sure that SSI vendors’ solutions are interoperable with one another is one of the major steps to achieving that vision.
