Argument-0007: Retention at Rank II

Report Date	2026/03/23
Submitted by	Alexandru Gheorghe

Member details

• Matrix username: @alexggh:parity.io
• Polkadot address: 14uA7Vc828e2Q6oL5GBHP9UzTkEvwqbroERwRmucGrLmPuuL
• Current rank: 2
• Date of initial induction: 2024/07/20
• Date of last report: 2025/12/21
• Area(s) of Expertise/Interest: Parachains consensus, statement-store protocol

Reporting period

• Start date: 2025/12/21
• End date: 2026/03/23

Argument

During this reporting period my focus has been on making the polkadot-sdk statement-store scalable. My work here is threefold: profiling and optimising the node to lower propagation latency and increase throughput, redesigning the RPC API so clients can efficiently interact with the store, and working on a v2 protocol design to overcome the scalability limits of the current flood-gossip model.

User API

As part of making the statement-store production ready, I worked on restructuring the RPC API, defining and implementing a new API with topic-based subscriptions so that clients can receive only the statements they care about.

Performance optimisations

After profiling the node under load, I fixed several bottlenecks in propagation, encoding, and initialisation (e.g. #10785, #10796, #10882, #11117). I've also been proposing and guiding the wider team on further scalability work around benchmarking, observability, rate limiting, and concurrency (e.g. #10617, #10941, #11051, #10976).

Long-term scalability

The current flood-gossip model, where every node stores all statements and forwards them to all peers, doesn't scale well. I've been working on a v2 protocol design that replaces flood gossip with topic-based DHT routing.

The team has already begun translating parts of this design into implementation. The first step is adding support for light statement store nodes, and making smoldot talk the statement-store protocol.

Other work

Besides the mentioned topics, I'm providing reviews for my area of expertise in polkadot-sdk. During this reporting period I reviewed PRs in polkadot-sdk, spanning statement-store, parachain consensus, and collator protocol.

Voting record

Ranks	Activity thresholds	Agreement thresholds	Member's voting activities	Comments
I	90%	N/A
II	80%	N/A	I have voted on 0 out of 0 referenda in which I was eligible to vote (i.e 100 % voting activity)	There were no referendums available for my rank to vote on.
III	70%	100%
IV	60%	90%
V	50%	80%
VI	40%	70%

Misc

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