Today, June 15th, 2026, I officially start my 6-month LFX mentorship under the Linux Foundation Decentralized Trust (LFDT) program. I will be working on a project called Hiero Contributor Identity Verification Prototype, under the guidance of my mentor Alexander Shenshin.

*## What am I building, and why does it matter? *
In open-source projects, anyone can open a pull request. But how does a project maintainer know that the person submitting code is actually who they claim to be? Right now, most projects simply trust GitHub usernames, which can be faked, compromised, or shared.
This project solves that by building a real identity verification layer on top of GitHub's contribution workflow. When a contributor opens a pull request, instead of just trusting their username, the system cryptographically verifies their identity using:

Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs) anchored on the Hedera blockchain
Verifiable Credentials issued through the OID4VCI standard
GPG cryptographic signatures tied to their GitHub account
Verifiable Presentations verified at pull request time through OID4VP

In simple terms, a contributor proves they are who they say they are, once, and that proof travels with every pull request they open, automatically. (There is another alternative, that is, instead of storing the proof, we can create the proof of user's validity on dynamically, after every Pull Request opened. Although, this is an open question and would be clarified by the end of week-1).

*## What will I be documenting here? *
I plan to post weekly updates throughout this mentorship. Each post will cover what I built that week, the architectural decisions I made and, more importantly, why I made them, and what I learned or found difficult.
Specifically, I will be tracking:

1) Weekly progress updates on implementation
2) Architecture Decision Records explaining key technical choices
3) Demo videos after every major milestone
4) Honest reflections on blockers, mistakes, and lessons learned

I have some experience working with decentralized identity standards like OID4VCI and OID4VP from my previous projects, so i will try to explain the concepts too in as much detail as possible, to help the community.

## How can these posts be useful to you
These posts can be a genuine learning chance for individuals who are thinking to study concepts like DIDs, and dive into blockchain.
If you are working on decentralized identity, Hedera, open-source tooling, or LFX mentorship yourself, you can follow along.

Thanks a lot for reading until here!!
We can connect here:
linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/darshit-khandelwal-49bb25288
GitHub: https://github.com/darshit2308