Following the Sovrin Foundation’s announcement detailing reductions in their team, we thought we’d share our own thinking.
Sovrin is now the world’s premier network dedicated to decentralized identity, with 60+ stewards including organizations such as IBM, NEC, and CULedger. Sovrin is one of the few identity networks with real-world use cases in production today. It’s proven, live, and being used. And it will continue well into the future.
The Sovrin Foundation provides governance, advocacy, and operational support for the Network. Unfortunately, the funding for its current operations that are based upon a strong central staffing model has failed to materialize. In response, the Foundation is now moving from paid staff to a greater reliance on volunteers from the ecosystem. The Board of Trustees remains in place, and the Foundation continues to fully function as the non-profit governance authority for the Sovrin ledger.
The majority of the work supporting the Sovrin network is already decentralized and supported by volunteers from a community of stewards, developers, and others working together to drive the SSI movement. This work includes governance and open-source code development. All Sovrin network nodes are operated on a decentralized basis. The change here is simply that additional activities, such as network operations, will now be more community-driven.
We expect that this transition to a more decentralized support model should have little or no day-to-day impact on network participants. It is our belief that the stewards will remain firmly committed to the decentralized operation of the ledger. The network is in good health and no disruptions to services are expected.
Evernym will continue to strongly support Sovrin. Our contributions include operating a node on the network, contributing to Hyperledger Aries, Indy, and Ursa (the open-source projects on which Sovrin is built), leading governance committees, and holding several Board seats. As the original creators of Sovrin, we remain its biggest advocate and supporter.
We thank the Sovrin Foundation staff for their hard work and passion, along with the success they’ve had in bringing the network and the community to life. We believe that the future of Sovrin remains very bright, and it will remain a leading force in bringing SSI to the world.
Please let us know if you have any questions.
Jason Law and Drummond Reed (Sovrin Foundation Trustees), on behalf of the Evernym team.
