Indy: Decentralization to the letter

Opposite to the most common blockchains nowadays, Hyperledger Indy brings decentralization to the letter. Unlike Bitcoin and Ethereum, t that collect all the transaction’s info within “the block” itself, Indy — a distributed ledger built on purpose for decentralized identity — only stores the user’s credentials’ public keys and schema info. This way, the credentials themselves are literally decentralized. Stored only on their owner’s devices.

The role of the blockchain is to ensure the credentials’ authenticity and validity but not to store it.

Using Sovrin (the most famous Indy production network), when the issuer emits the credential, it goes directly to the owner’s wallet, using the schema stored on the blockchain and signed with private keys that can be verified by the public keys stored within the record of the credential on the blockchain.

Note that the credential data itself it’s not stored, but it’s public keys and schema, only.

It’s the issuer’s role to keep record of the issued credential and, in case of a missing wallet, it’s the owner’s responsibility to ask the issuer for a new credential and to invalidate the lost one.

This is how it is today in case of a lost bank card. The issuer bank needs to be asked to cancel it and to issue another one. The same happens with Indy.

The main difference? With Indy everything can be done through the web.