Argument-0003: Retain at Rank IV

Member details

• Polkadot address: 12pRzYaysQz6Tr1e78sRmu9FGB8gu8yTek9x6xwVFFAwXTM8

• Current rank: 4

• Date of initial induction: 2023/07/16

• Date of last report: 2025/01/06

• Area(s) of Expertise/Interest: Parachains Consensus

Reporting period

• End date: 2025/01/06
• End date: 2024/06/24

Argument

In this period my main focus was on leading a strategic shift of Polkadot development towards low latency and improving block confidence to top standards.

Please find more details in the first draft of the low latency design doc. While this is only a first draft, which is going to be replaced by an improved version with better properties (e.g. with regards to censorship resistance and threat model), it still gives a good introduction into the problem we are trying to solve.

This goes together with other initiatives we are cooperating with, like the reliability dashboard. This dashboard is meant to become public, showing current state of Polkadot with regards to block confidence and latency and will make improvements highly visible to the general public. The goal is to make Polkadot the industry standard with regards to resilience, reliability and block confidence, within the next 2 years. For this year, we are aiming to tackle most if not all reasons for reduced block confidence under good conditions. Next year, we will tackle block confidence in less optimal and even adversarial conditions. In this regard I am also cooperating with Web3 research to improve Polkadot's parachain censorship resistance further.

With regards to outreach, we are currently actively engaging with Distractive to improve the polkadot.com website to better communicate Polkadot to a wider audience and making the ecosystem more accessible.

Other than that, I was also involved in improving Agile Coretime and authored the RFC-149 short term fix.

Contribution Selection

In my current role, my efforts are mostly design, strategic, leading and educational. Examples of projects, I am involved in:

• Agile Coretime (RFC-17, RFC-149)
• Elastic Scaling
• Collator Protocol Revamp
• Validator Disabling (Limit impact of bad validators on the network - Resilience improvements)
• Kusama Finality Stall aftermath (Resilience improvements)
• litep2p launch (Performance, Scalability and resilience improvements)
• Building on older relay parents (Block confidence)
• Bringing NOMT to Substrate

Voting Participation

I usually try my best to be quite active and apparently managed to vote on 64.51% of the referenda I could vote on, according to https://fellowship.tasty.limo/ .