Argument-0008: Retention at Rank II

Report Date	Date of submission (2026/03/29)
Submitted by	Branislav Kontur

Member details

• Matrix username: @branislav_kontur:parity.io
• Polkadot address: 1HFq3DbX4tqanTLAx2CAToWnHXg6LRLMzSD4JzYCzCQpw5E
• Current rank: 2
• Date of initial induction: 2024/05/03
• Date of last report: 2026/01/03
• Area(s) of Expertise/Interest: Bulletin, Bridges, XCM, System Parachains, governance, benchmarking, testing, integration, IPFS, Bitswap

Reporting period

• Start date: 2026/01/03
• End date: 2026/03/28

Argument

This summary outlines my activities, contributions, and collaborations during the reporting period (January–March 2026).

Bulletin Chain — Delivery

I continued leading the delivery of the Bulletin Chain, Polkadot's ephemeral storage chain designed to support Proof-of-Personhood (PoP) features and broader Web3 applications.

The Bulletin Chain originally started as a solochain. As the Polkadot SDK evolved, we decided to go with a Polkadot parachain design, which we also enabled through the PR adding parachain support [1]. This transition allows Bulletin to benefit from Polkadot's shared security and cross-chain messaging capabilities, eliminating the need for a dedicated substrate-to-substrate bridge that was previously required for the solochain setup.

My role has been primarily focused on planning, coordination, design, improvement, and unblocking the team — which naturally results in fewer direct PRs but significant impact on delivery velocity. Key activities include:

• Bulletin Polkadot parachain release: Prepared the Bulletin for its first Polkadot mainnet release using a staged deployment plan — first onboarding an empty runtime to secure the parachain slot, then upgrading with the full Bulletin runtime via governance. I prepared the onboarding proposal [2], the Fellows runtime PR [3] with a tracking issue [4], coordinated the Fellows release process and publishing Bulletin crates.
• Bulletin testnet deployments: Coordinated deployment cycles for Westend and Paseo Bulletin networks.
• Benchmarking and performance: Conducted testing and benchmarking of Bulletin storage capabilities.
• Bulletin UI: Deployed the initial Bulletin UI and set directions for further UI development.

IPFS / Bitswap / Smoldot

I continued deepening expertise in IPFS/Bitswap:

• Investigated and reported a >32MiB file transfer issue in litep2p [5], proposed a solution, and handed it to Dmitry for implementation.
• Participated in the Smoldot Bitswap RPC API design together with Dmitry Markin and Basti, which resulted in the JSON-RPC spec PR [6], with a follow-up for bitswap_stream coming.

Other Parity + Fellows Ecosystem Contributions

• Helped push the Hyperbridge fix through the Fellows release 2.0.7 pipeline [7], reviewing and facilitating the release.
• Ongoing PR reviews across polkadot-sdk, polkadot-bulletin-chain, and the Fellows runtimes repositories.
• Reviewing (and/or working on) numerous design documents including HOP protocol, data renewal, node syncing, and storage architecture proposals.

Web3 Storage PoC

I helped stabilize and push the initial demo of the Web3 Storage proof-of-concept [8] based on the storage design [9], — a user-facing decentralized storage solution. My contributions included setting up the storage provider infrastructure, fixing CI and integration issues, and identifying future changes needed beyond the PoC phase — such as storage provider architecture improvements and scalability concerns for the transition to production.

Voting record

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
II	80%	N/A	I have voted on 0 out of 0 referenda in which I was eligible to vote (i.e 0 % voting activity).
III	70%	100%
IV	60%	90%
V	50%	80%
VI	40%	70%