Argument-0005: Retention at Rank 2

Member details

• Matrix username: @tsvetomir:parity.io
• Polkadot address: 1QhVP5qzR2LfXqP77N1JcuwHoY7NH8JVRNFm1hSooE9d4pR
• Current rank: 2
• Date of initial induction: 2023/10/11
• Date of last report: 2025/12/08
• Area(s) of Expertise/Interest: Disputes, Collator protocol

Reporting period

• Start date: 2025/12/08
• End date: 2026/02/25

Argument

During this reporting period, my primary focus was driving the collator protocol revamp to completion. I finalized @alindima’s work on the collation manager and the main subsystem (polkadot-sdk pr-8541). Additionally, I developed a comprehensive test plan for the new implementation and a deployment strategy for rolling out the changes on Westend. During testing I discovered two new issues:

• If request_candidates_pending_availability runtime call fails during reputation bumps extraction the processing of the rest of the candidates was terminated. Fixed in polkadot-sdk pr-10610.
• A service race in libp2p (which was also discovered by @lexnv). I helped with the fix validation since it was easy to reproduce with the malus-collator. The fix by @lexnv is in litep2p pr-525. Disclaimer: I have no contribution for the fix itself.

I also verified the protocol’s resilience against spam attacks and confirmed that the collator scoring system functions correctly. Both were validated using malus-collator and local zombienet-sdk tests. Finally, I applied minor fixes to malus-collator and extended it with a new malicious behavior.

Since the collator revamp testing and malus-collator development are still not open sourced I can't give too much details about the actual test results and contributions to the Polkadot network.

Voting record

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