Solidus Relay vs the OpenWallet Foundation mediator

The OpenWallet Foundation's DIDComm Mediator Service is the reference implementation of the thing Solidus Relay is a hosted version of. This comparison is less "which is better" than "do you want to run it yourself, under foundation governance, or connect to someone else's."

Where Solidus Relay is different

It is a hosted, multi-tenant service rather than software you deploy, with an operator plane across many agents, and two capabilities the OWF service does not offer: credential-gated admission (fail-closed, with a verdict distinguishing an unreachable verifier from an invalid credential, credential-gated mediation) and chain-anchored resolution of correspondents' did:solidus routing (chain-anchored routing resolution).

That is the honest extent of the difference. We are not claiming better DIDComm. We are claiming a different operational shape plus admission control.

The argument against us that we think is strongest

A foundation project outlives a startup. If the mediator is load-bearing infrastructure for a system you expect to run for a decade, "who maintains this in five years" is a better question than any feature comparison, and the OWF answer is straightforwardly better than ours.

We would rather state that than have you work it out later.

Choosing

Choose the OWF mediator if you want to self-host, if governance continuity matters, if you need Apache 2.0, or if no third party may sit in your message path.

Choose Solidus Relay if you would rather not operate a mediator at all, and credential-gated admission is worth a beta dependency to you.

And genuinely consider self-hosting either way, vs running your own mediator argues that case properly, including the parts that make it a bad idea.