Veramo in 2023

Published in

Veramo

5 min readDec 22, 2023

As we look back on the past year, we’re amazed by all our incredible accomplishments.

Read on to take a look at our journey through 2023, the exciting milestones we reached together, and what 2024 looks like for the Veramo community.

Increased community contributions and participation

Our community has witnessed an upsurge indicating a flourishing engagement ecosystem. This surge reflects the collective effort of our community, poured into building Veramo. Community contributions and discussion participation soared this year, creating an environment where diverse perspectives meet. We also received lots of positive feedback which has been particularly heartwarming.

2023 was the [first] year of the community for Veramo.
Since the first lines of code, Veramo was meant to be a public good project. It was developed in the open under the old uport-project org on GitHub with the intent that it would be the tool to use when getting started with SSI & verifiable data.

This intent is manifested in 2 ways, the architecture and the basics.
The architecture we chose is open, modular, and extensible. The choice was obvious to us as we were looking for a way to work in a rapidly evolving space with new and growing standards and protocols. In such a space, it would have been hard for our team to do everything internally and reasonably keep up with everything. We opted to reuse existing tooling and libraries as much as possible instead of writing new implementations, and this option now manifests as a way for anyone to use their existing tools and libraries to create plugins for Veramo.
The basics are all the plugins developed alongside the core package to use as a starting point to build products and apps as well as new protocols. They cover most of what you would need to function in the issuer-holder-verifier triangle of Verifiable Credentials, like key and DID management, credential issuance, storage, messaging, presentation, and verification, with a diverse set of formats and algorithms built in.

The ease of adding new functionality and the ability to decide which plugins to use instead of hauling around a monolith has brought a lot of attention to the Veramo framework and has prompted many folks to not only adopt it for their projects but also to contribute back some of their additions. It’s worth highlighting some of the new features and the teams that were the most active developing them: new sub-protocols supported for did-comm: coordinate mediation, trust-ping, message-pickup, routing, as well as message attachments; support for Secp256r1 for signing credentials; a new storage plugin based on kv-store; native support for did:peer, did:jwk, did:pkh and meta-transaction support for did:ethr.

Masca, Sphereon, Tuum tech, Spherity, LTO network, and Geo Web are some teams that contributed these features and deserve a shoutout.

Tech updates

Besides the contributions from the community, the recent releases of Veramo have focused on stability and interoperability improvements. Having a growing set of projects use Veramo means there is an increase in the number of corner cases encountered, new ways in which it is deployed, or plain interoperability friction. This is a great way to discover and fix bugs and make the platform as a whole much more robust. To that end, Veramo is now much more lenient with the encoding quirks of certain libraries, DIDs, or systems, and we upgraded the encryption capabilities for the did-comm package to adhere to the spec requirements and recommendations for key wrapping and content encryption.

Alongside the Veramo framework, we’ve had some interesting collaborations and projects this year. Our team was a launch partner for the Collab.land marketplace, creating one of its first mini-apps.

We significantly upgraded the architecture of the agent-explore tool and it now follows the same principles of modularity and extensibility as the Veramo framework. We hope this tool will foster the same kind of innovation in the user interface space as the Veramo framework already has done in the DID/Credential space. We used some of the learnings from that to build a VSCode extension for improving the experience of working with raw Verifiable Credentials.

We also used this basis to participate in the Newforum identity hackathon where our BrainShare plugin for agent-explore got us a spot among the winning projects.

Veramo donated to DIF

In October this year, Veramo was donated to the Decentralized Identity Foundation (DIF) to ensure continuous collaboration and support within the broader decentralized identity community.

As part of DIF, we’ll continue to build and develop the project, alongside our community with support from the foundation. A Veramo User Group will be created in 2024, and all the members of our community, code contributors, and partners are welcome to join. The user group will be open to all regardless of DIF membership. More details about this will be shared in January, stay tuned.

Outreach

Veramo had a strong presence at various events throughout the year, fostering connections and sharing insights with the wider community. From the Rebooting Web of Trust to Berlin Blockchain Week, IIW38, and Eth Denver. Alongside Ceramic, we co-hosted RepConnect at DevConnect Istanbul. Outreaches like this are great opportunities to learn, share, and connect with other people in the reputation space.

Conclusion

Community and open source will remain at the forefront of our efforts, as they have been integral to what we’ve built. In the coming months, some members of our community will be stepping up as maintainers to accelerate the work on the framework and ensure its future and sustainability. We appreciate the members of our community’s support and efforts thus far and would like to thank every one of you for your vital contributions.

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.