Polkadot Technical Fellowship application: Michał Gil

Background

My name is Michał Gil. I hold a Master's degree in Computer Science from the Wrocław University of Science and Technology (Politechnika Wrocławska), with a specialty in Data Science and Machine Learning. I have worked in the IT industry since 2016, full time as a software engineer since 2018, across companies of various sizes and domains. Before joining the Polkadot ecosystem I worked on a trading platform for digital assets (t-dx.com), where I led delivery of the retail-focused part of the platform.

Since October 2024 I have worked at Parity Technologies as a Runtime Engineer. About 2 months after my onboarding I joined the Proof of Personhood project and worked on the People Chain, its runtime pallets and its integration with the rest of the Polkadot ecosystem.

Motivation

Joining the Fellowship is a natural continuation of the work I already do every day on Polkadot's runtime layer. Knowing the internals of the Polkadot SDK, I can assess runtime upgrades and other technical proposals. I understand the importance of Polkadot's decentralization while keeping the network secure and reliable, and I want to contribute that perspective to the technical governance of the protocol. Fellowship membership would formalize my ongoing contributions and align my work on Proof of Personhood with the ecosystem's technical direction.

Areas of interest

Proof of Personhood: means of proving personhood (DIMs), personhood distribution across chains
FRAME runtime engineering: offchain worker, transaction pool, benchmarking and weights
XCM and cross-chain protocol design
Cryptography used in Proof of Personhood, e.g. ring VRF, ZK proofs

Contributions

During nearly 2 years on the Proof of Personhood project I have authored various contributions. Highlights:

Cross-chain personhood distribution: I designed and implemented the mechanism by which the People Chain shares ring roots (cryptographic commitments to member sets) with other chains: the members-notifier pallet (publisher, People Chain) and the members-subscriber pallet (consumer, e.g. Asset Hub), letting any chain verify ring VRF personhood proofs locally.
The dotNS gateway: I designed the solution and wrote the specification for integrating dotNS username reservation and registration into the personhood induction flow, then implemented the dotns-gateway pallet on Asset Hub and led the cross-team delivery with the dotNS and Identity Backend teams.
People Chain bootstrap: the storage-initialization pallet, a multi-block state machine that initializes the chain's economic state via a real XCM asset transfer from Asset Hub.
People pallet hardening: benchmark suite, unit tests for ring merges, suspensions and onboarding, VRF ring baking as an offchain worker job, statement store validation for proven people.
Personhood building blocks: tests, benchmarks and offchain worker processing for mob-rule (decentralized judgements); invitations and incremental referrals for proof-of-ink; scheduling, benchmarks and weights for the game pallet (Proof of Video Interaction).

The project was developed in the private paritytech/individuality repository, to which many Fellowship members have access; the codebase has since been published at paritytech/individuality-community.

Contact

GitHub: Zebedeusz
Polkadot address: 15tQbv1FDUU9WcNtiXsCWUiWMzDEL9r6N6k43bAjjGFQF3ig