Evidence-0001: Promotion to Rank 1

Report Date
2026/04/16

Submitted by
Diego Romero

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Member Details

• Matrix username: @dimartiro:matrix.org
• Polkadot address: 5FZGEDktFdfGuUjYAbdSdjwt67pXf4UQHcyiW9Wk4hrYvxvY
• Current rank: Candidate
• Date of initial induction: 2026/04/15
• Date of last report: N/A
• Area(s) of Expertise/Interest: Substrate, Snowbridge, Developer Tooling, Clients (Gossamer), JAM

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Reporting Period

• Start date: 2023/03/20
• End date: 2026/04/16

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Evidence

Protocol & Bridge Improvements (Snowbridge)

polkadot-sdk – Snowbridge

• Improve inbound_queue::BenchmarkHelper to add more flexibility
  Flexibility Enhancement: Enabled more configurable benchmarking scenarios, improving accuracy when evaluating bridge performance.

• Add generic AggregateMessageOrigin
  Extensibility Improvement: Generalised message origin handling, making the bridge logic more modular and easier to extend.

• Rewards issue reported in Snowbridge V2
  Protocol Correctness: Identified a rewards-related issue affecting incentive distribution, contributing to the robustness of the bridge design.

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Developer Tooling – Forking Support

Foundry Polkadot

• #392, #426, #505, #508

• Adding forking support with lazy state loading
  Developer Experience: Implemented a lazy-loading backend to fetch remote state on demand, enabling local execution against real network state.

• RPC-based state retrieval integration
  Efficiency Improvement: Reduced the need for full state replication by fetching storage only when required.

Impact:

• Enables a Foundry/Hardhat-like workflow for Substrate
• Lowers the barrier for testing and debugging against live chains

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Tooling, CI & Dependency Management

polkadot-sdk / Zepter

• Zepter duplicate-deps check in CI
  Build Reliability: Prevents dependency duplication across Cargo.toml sections.

• Remove unused deps
  Maintenance Improvement: Reduces codebase complexity and potential attack surface.

• Dedup dependencies
  Efficiency: Improves build times and binary size consistency.

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Professional Experience

• Currently working at ChainSafe, contributing to core infrastructure in the Polkadot ecosystem.
• Part of the team behind Gossamer, an alternative Polkadot client implemented in Go.
• Currently working on the JAM (Join-Accumulate Machine) implementation in Go.

Impact:

• Contributing to client diversity in Polkadot (critical for decentralisation and resilience)
• Working on next-generation protocol components (JAM)

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Summary

Contributions focused on protocol-level improvements and developer experience, including:

• Improving Snowbridge correctness and extensibility
• Enabling realistic local development via forking
• Strengthening tooling and build reliability
• Contributing to alternative client development and future protocol evolution (Gossamer & JAM)