CODEWITHSUNDEEP
hyperledgerhyperledger-indy
Akshay Sood
Akshay Sood

Reputation: 6786

Hyperledger Indy: What are Trustees and Steward?

I am a beginner in Hyperledger Indy and due to the fact that it is at a very initial stage, I am facing some issues in understanding the basic concepts. I could not find any information about Trustee and Steward. I would appreciate if someone can explain these roles.

Upvotes: 1

Views: 2323

Answers (2)

Glauco C.
Glauco C.

Reputation: 11

In an Indy based network there are some initials users called endorsers, these include stewards and trustees. Only trustees and stewards can create new endorsers and a trustee can be created only by other trustees. You can read more information in the Hyperledger Indy official documentation in the genesis-transactions section

STEWARDS

Indy is designed to be operated such that everyone can see the contents of the blockchain (public), but only pre-approved participants, known as stewards, are permitted to participate in the validation process (permissioned).

TRUSTEES

To understand trustees I suggest you read the documentation about Trustee Setup Protocol, assumptions section, I report here some parts that in my opinion are useful for understanding the concept of trustee through a series of features that it guarantees as an entity to other network users.

Trustees can be granted various capabilities by identity owners:

  • Safeguarding a recovery share. This will be the most common
  • Revoke an authorized agent on behalf of an identity owner
  • Provision a new agent on behalf of an identity owner
  • Be an administrator for managing identity owner agents

SOVRIN NETWORK (a further concept of trustee)

In the Sovrin Network (a single, global instance of Hyperledger Indy), each node is operated by a Sovrin steward, an organization (company, government, university, etc.) that has agreed to a legal agreement that defines how they will operate their node (minimum hardware, network access, monitoring, security, maintenance, etc.) within the rules defined in the Sovrin governance framework. The Sovrin Foundation, through its governance frameworks, provides governance for the network, the use of nodes and coordinating the software upgrades (including adding new features) to the nodes. In addition to the concept of trustee already described in the Sovrin network the Foundation includes a Board of Trustees to oversee the business and legal aspects of the network and a Technical Governance Board to oversee the technical aspects.

Upvotes: 1

Shyam Pratap Singh
Shyam Pratap Singh

Reputation: 161

Hyperledger is a public permissioned network. It means that anybody can see the transaction but only a few can write the transaction into the ledger. Stewards are the ones who can write the transaction into Hyperleder Indy ledger maintained by Sovrin.

Stewards can be a high profile Government-owned institution whose task is to run and maintained the sovrin network. To become a steward, there is a proper onboarding process defined by Sovrin.

Trustee The trustee's role is to become a guardian for other identity holders in case of recovering identities. e.g User A can nominate User B to be his trustee so that in case of User A lost his mobile, identity can be still recovered with the help of User B. User B can be banks or any trusted service provider or Individuals.

Bonus Point

Trust Anchor(TA): TA's are the link between User and Stewards. TA can be banks, universities, hospitals, service providers, insurance companies. TA's are onboarded by approvals of Stewards. So TA accepts the request from user and forwards this request to Stewards in case of writing into the ledger.

Upvotes: 2

Related Questions