Retain davxy at rank 3

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Evidence for Retention

Argument-0008: Retention at Rank III

Report Date 2026/04/09
Submitted by Davide Galassi

Member details

  • Matrix username: @davxy:matrix.org
  • Polkadot address: 16Q4qkRcWd4r8196dVGNLYVfy7H86MJYJBMockPaMigFXCyv
  • Current rank: 3
  • Date of initial induction: 2024/01/08
  • Date of last report: 2025/10/20
  • Area(s) of Expertise/Interest: JAM Protocol, Applied Cryptography, Consensus Protocols

Reporting period

  • Start date: 2025/10/20
  • End date: 2026/04/09

Argument

During this period my work has been concentrated on PolkaJam development, Gray Paper review, JAM cross-team conformance tooling and VRF cryptographic primitives.

JAM

PolkaJam

As a member of the PolkaJam team, submitted several PRs during this period.

Most of the work focused on improving the conformance fuzzer tooling integrated into the node: STF coverage, custom block mutators, remote target support, and CLI features. The fuzzer has been actively used by the W3F team in charge of JAM Milestone 1 delivery assessments.

Other contributions include bug fixes and security patches, several of which surfaced through fuzz testing, and Gray Paper 0.7.2 alignment of our experimental node.

Gray Paper

Continued contributing to the Gray Paper specification with improvement proposals, fixes, and review of other contributors' work. PRs

JAM Conformance

Maintenance of the JAM Conformance repository, the coordination hub for cross-team M1 conformance testing. During this period, a simple web application has been developed to easily run the fuzzer and visualize results, primarily to support the W3F assessment team and as a reference for the upcoming self-service fuzzer from Parity. Other work included refining a conformance matrix proposal for M1 acceptance criteria, onboarding additional JAM implementations as fuzzing targets, and keeping conformance reports up to date. Currently 23 teams are being actively fuzzed and monitored.

Released JAM Test Vectors v0.7.2 aligned with the latest Gray Paper version, and published ed25519 critical test vectors for JAM conformance.

Polkadot SDK

Authored RFC-163: EC Host Functions, merged into the Fellowship RFCs repository, proposing a set of elliptic curve host functions for the Polkadot runtime. The implementation PRs in polkadot-sdk leverage the arkworks-extensions library, also maintained as part of this effort, to route compute-heavy arkworks operations through the host functions specified by the RFC.

Crypto

Bandersnatch VRF

The ark-vrf library, used by all JAM teams, received substantial work during this period. Major changes include batch verification for Ring, Thin and Pedersen VRF, multi-I/O VRF support, Thin and Tiny VRF, a pluggable Transcript trait for challenge and nonce derivation, and Straus MSM. PRs

In parallel, the Bandersnatch VRF-AD specification advanced from Draft 29 to Draft 33, incorporating a major spec rework, security hardening of nonce procedure and challenge length, transcript and delinearization refactoring per W3F research team review, and the introduction of Tiny VRF. PRs

Ring Proof

Some contributions to the ring-proof library, mostly focused on batch verification optimization and API refinement. PRs

The Ring Proof specification was also updated to improve consistency and add implementation references.

Verifiable

Main contributor and maintainer of the verifiable library, a middleware layer between chain business logic and ring VRF cryptographic primitives, mostly used by the upcoming Individuality project, best known for its Proof of Personhood logic.

Voting record

Ranks Activity thresholds Agreement thresholds Member's voting activities Comments
I 90% N/A
II 80% N/A
III 70% 100% 87%
IV 60% 90%
V 50% 80%
VI 40% 70%

Misc

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Status
Decision14d
Confirmation
1hr
Attempts
0
Tally
100%Aye
0%Nay
Aye1
Nay0
  • 10.00%
  • 0.0%

    Threshold

  • 0.0%
Bare Aye1
Max Voters7
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