| Report Date | 2025/10/20 |
| Submitted by | Davide Galassi |
Since joining the Polkadot Fellowship, I've had the opportunity to work on various technical challenges across the ecosystem. My journey has taken me from contributing to the Polkadot SDK as part of the SDK Node team to becoming involved with JAM development. Along the way, I've been able to contribute to various foundational specifications and implementations that support the broad Polkadot ecosystem.
Key contributions summary:
My initial work focused on analyzing and implementing the Sassafras consensus protocol from Burdges et al. whitepaper. This first required developing a good understanding of the existing Substrate consensus implementations to properly integrate the new protocol.
The most significant technical challenge was mastering Ring-VRF design, which became a key area of expertise by itself. I collaborated closely with the W3F research team, occasionally contributing to their backends while integrating their research into a practical implementation.
Key deliverable from this work: A Sassafras working prototype implementation proposed in PR #1336
While this work was almost ready for upstream integration, development was paused when priorities shifted to Safrole for the JAM protocol.
The foundation built during Sassafras prototyping proved invaluable for the subsequent Safrole work - adaptation of Sassafras for the new JAM technology. The transition felt natural given that Safrole is fundamentally a derivative work simplified for JAM's unique requirements.
My contributions to Safrole include:
My involvement with Polkadot-SDK ecosystem spans nearly four years as a Parity employee and as part of the Fellowship, during which I've developed expertise in the Polkadot-SDK project. Before focusing on JAM development, I was primarily engaged with what were originally the Substrate libraries, with focus on foundational primitives as part of my daily job in the Parity's Node SDK team.
The years invested collaborating with first-class ecosystem engineers and researchers provided the invaluable foundation that shaped my technical perspective and capabilities.
As a PolkaJAM team member, I try to being keep my knowledge up to date with the various subsystems, though my primary expertise lies in:
Due to JAM's clean-room implementation requirements, the PolkaJAM repository remains closed source during development. Parity colleagues can review my contributions here.
I authored RFC-26, a detailed specification that bridges academic research and practical engineering. The document translates the complex concepts from the Sassafras research paper into concrete implementation guidelines.
It defines the full specification for implementing Sassafras consensus and establishes a potential foundation for next-generation Polkadot rollups to leverage advanced consensus mechanisms.
I co-authored two specifications that became foundational components of the JAM protocol:
These specifications serve as a reference for implementing these cryptographic primitives across the JAM ecosystem. The work involved translating cutting-edge cryptographic research into precise, implementable protocols.
I implemented ark-vrf, a production-ready Rust implementation of VRF schemes built over W3F ring proof and Arkworks libraries. This library is currently used by all the JAM teams.
I contribute to the Gray Paper, the JAM protocol formal specification. My initial work included inclusion of the Bandersnatch VRF cryptographic primitive description and review of the Safrole authoring section. I now continue to provide general input and review support as the document evolves.
My contributions are available here.
I'm helping different teams follow the JAM Gray Paper requirements. This is a basic service and mostly delivered with the distribution of a comprehensive set of Test Vectors for the JAM STF defined by the Gray Paper. These vectors became a widely accepted reference for JAM implementors and have been instrumental in accelerating interoperability.
I provide ongoing technical support through public channels, focusing on areas within my core expertise including consensus protocols, cryptographic implementations, and Gray Paper interpretation.
I established structured cross-team collaboration workflows through the dedicated JAM Conformance Channel and Conformance Repository, which serves as the central coordination hub for:
I deliver the data powering the JAM Conformance Dashboard that provides critical insights for M1 audit timings. This dashboard enables teams to assess implementations STF execution time to ensure equivalent confidence levels in correctness validation across all implementations.
I developed a fuzzer for JAM Milestone-1 conformance testing. This tool generates randomized inputs to stress-test JAM implementations, systematically discovering edge cases and bugs that manual testing might miss.
The fuzzer has proven highly effective at identifying flaws across multiple implementations, with all findings transparently reported through the aforementioned channels. This quality assurance process is essential for M1 assessment and will likely remain relevant post-production for continuous conformance validation.
Provide your voting record in relation to required thresholds for your rank.
| Ranks | Activity thresholds | Agreement thresholds | Member's voting activities | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| I | 90% | N/A | N/A | There were no votes to participate in. |
| II | 80% | N/A | N/A | There were no votes to participate in. |
| III | 70% | N/A | ||
| IV | 60% | N/A | ||
| V | 50% | N/A | ||
| VI | 40% | N/A |
Threshold