| Report Date | Date of submission (2026/01/10) |
| Submitted by | Christian Langenbacher |
@clang:matrix.org16YCL3UVpVWQLGW3p3Zx4k5WAEp9W1DwdDnxAbyAaPxVxnp322024/03/272025/09/15Parachain Builder, Runtime, ClientsMy argument primarily revolves around PRs and issues that I filed in the Polkadot SDK and Runtimes repositories. Additionally, I was quite active in Element chats, helping community members with technical questions.
Penpal was intended to have PEN as its native token and DOT as a foreign asset. However, DOT was ambiguously used as if it were the native token; for example, it was strictly used to pay both XCM execution and XCM delivery fees.
I performed a major revamp of Penpal’s configuration to clearly establish PEN as the first-class native token, while DOT is now properly treated as a foreign asset. As part of this work, I merged Penpal’s Assets and ForeignAssets pallet instances into a single Assets instance, thereby unifying asset management on Penpal while preserving the distinction between local and foreign assets at the AssetsTransactor level. I also integrated the AssetConversion and AssetConversionTxPayment pallets to retain the ability to automatically swap tokens for fee payment.
This constituted a breaking change for the integration testing environment involving Penpal, Asset Hub Westend, Asset Hub Rococo, Bridge Hub Westend, and Bridge Hub Rococo across multiple dimensions. Each test spans multiple chains and had to be carefully reviewed to ensure that invariants and test coverage remained intact. One additional example concerns helper macros, which implicitly assumed that the asset instance handling foreign assets was separate from the one handling local assets and was explicitly named ForeignAssets. While integrating these changes into the integration tests, I generalized these macros to allow specifying the name of the Assets instance. Not all implicit assumptions related to asset handling in the testing environment have been removed yet, but I plan to address them in follow-up work.
The PR integrating these changes has not yet been merged, but is expected to be merged soon.
substrate_runtime build flagDuring the introduction of pallet-revive, the substrate_runtime build flag was added. This flag must be set in addition to no_std when compiling to WASM. The substrate-wasm-builder configures this automatically, so runtime developers typically do not encounter this requirement. However, I have repeatedly addressed confusion among ecosystem developers related to build errors caused by the missing RUST_FLAG over the past months [1], [2], [3].
To prevent further confusion, I added a dedicated paragraph to the documentation and prominently highlighted it in the Polkadot SDK README [4].
The XCM error reporting mechanism is partially broken and results in an XCM execution error when the enclosing XCM context requires fee payment. This issue went unnoticed because the instruction was typically used only in UnpaidExecution contexts. I identified the problem and temporarily disabled error reporting until a proper fix can be implemented.
Additionally, I was involved in 14 Polkadot SDK issues, 9 Runtimes issues, and authored several minor fixes in the Runtimes repository [5], [6].
Lastly, drawing on my accumulated development experience and operational knowledge of running validators, I have frequently assisted community members in Element chats. Regular participants in these discussions have likely observed my involvement.
| Ranks | Activity thresholds | Agreement thresholds | Member's voting activities | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| I | 90% | N/A | ||
| II | 80% | N/A | No eligible referenda | |
| III | 70% | 100% | ||
| IV | 60% | 90% | ||
| V | 50% | 80% | ||
| VI | 40% | 70% |