I agree, the worst part of the Aries project is the extreme egos associated with it - but i do really like the ideals.
Another example of over reach: Trust over IP [1]
Again congratulations of the launch, I am not advocating Aries but I am very interested. Especially the intersection of actual users (what you are doing) / pie-in-the-sky ideals
Thankyou for taking the time to respond, and congratulations on the launch!
Aries leverages, Decentralized Identifiers[1] with Verifiable Credentials [2]
the "ledger" is where the public keys are stored. eg it could be a permission-ed ledger, similar to SSL certs only known/<want to be known> parties would publish their keys to the chain.
Example: Sovrin network [3]
Or could be permission-less, maybe focused more towards IoT/whatever
Example: ION Network [4] coming out of Microsoft.
The ledger is not a requirement to establish an identity as shown with the did:peer [5] method
Frankly I think the usage of blockchain was more to get on the marketing bandwagon at the time. Messaging is now moving from "blockchain" to "distributed ledger"