Argument-0001: Retention at Rank 4


Report Date	Date of submission (2026/03/11)
Submitted by	Shawn Tabrizi.

Member details

Matrix username: @shawntabrizi:matrix.org
Polkadot address: 12hAtDZJGt4of3m2GqZcUCVAjZPALfvPwvtUTFZPQUbdX1Ud
Current rank: 4
Date of initial induction: 2023 (seeded via TC motion 166)
Date of last report: N/A (first argument submission)
Area(s) of Expertise/Interest: XCM, Frame, Runtime, Testing, Tooling

Reporting period

Start date: 2025/09/11
End date: 2026/03/11

Argument

I have been a member of the Polkadot Technical Fellowship since its seeding. During the first years of the fellowship, I was quite active as both a core developer and fellowship member.

Over the past year, I stepped back from day-to-day core development, but I remained active in the Polkadot community, mostly through education and advocacy. I have taught as a lead instructor at every Polkadot Blockchain Academy, most recently PBA 7 in Bali (Aug-Sep 2025), and I am signed up to teach at PBA Lisbon (Apr 2026). A lot of these students ended up joining the fellowship or working at Parity and other Polkadot teams. I have personally inducted 24 members into the fellowship on-chain, 9 of which were during this reporting period.

I also gave presentations on the fellowship, JAM, PolkaVM, and the Polkadot Cloud/Hub at various conferences during this period.

More recently, I have started returning to active development. I am building Open Auto Battler, an on-chain game built with the Polkadot SDK, and have been doing code review and tooling work again. I hope to focus some time on tooling specifically bridging the Polkadot SDK and AI tooling.

Recent Public Activity

Inducted 9 new fellowship members on-chain (Sep-Oct 2025)
Open Auto Battler - On-chain auto-battler game built on Polkadot and Substrate, part of the move toward a user and application focused Polkadot. 450+ commits since January 2026.
World Computer slides - New lecture module on "The World Computer" for PBA content.
Gitorial CLI v2.0 - Rewrite of the Gitorial CLI, used for PBA and Polkadot developer education.
Introduce --latest flag for psvm - Polkadot SDK Version Manager improvement.
Fellowship dashboard improvements - Added links to the Induction Section.
Maintained substrate-collectables-workshop and rust-state-machine, both used across PBA cohorts.
Code review in paritytech/polkadot-sdk: #10713, #10711, #10634, #10444, #10045
Documentation fixes in polkadot-js/docs: #500, #496
Issues filed against polkadot-api: #1295, #1293
sub0 Reset, Bangkok (Nov 2024) - Keynote on JAM and the Polkadot Cloud, plus "Building on Polkadot" workshop. (BitPinas coverage)
BUIDL HERE Conference, San Juan (Feb 2025) - "The Future of Web3". (Slides, Blog post)
Protocol Berg, Berlin (Jun 2025) - "PolkaVM: A fast and secure RISC-V based virtual machine." (Recording)

Voting record

I have voted on 18 proposals in this last retention period. I intend to increase my activity and participation in fellowship governance and core contributions.