Argument-0003: Retention at Rank I

Report Date	2026-05-14
Submitted by	rockbmb

Member details

• Matrix username: @[email protected]
• Polkadot address: 13jBAtYJar4xujPaEx41FxjSt9PqU7LqJRbySJiVdMtuWN42
• Current rank: 1
• Date of initial induction: 2025-10-28
• Date of last report: 2026-02-13
• Area(s) of Expertise/Interest: System Parachains, Polkadot Runtime

Reporting period

• Start date: 2026-02-14
• End date: 2026-05-31

Evidence

During this reporting period I continued my work on testing pallets deployed on system chains.

pallet-psm

pallet-psm is the stablecoin mechanism for pUSD on Asset Hub. Users deposit external assets and mint pUSD against them; the pallet must maintain invariants between reserves, debt, and issuance.

I added try_state checks and fuzz testing to the pallet (#11805, awaiting review). The try_state checks encode the pallet's accounting invariants so they can be validated during runtime upgrades. The fuzzers — one coverage-guided, one stateful — exercise the pallet's state machine more thoroughly than unit tests alone.

I also wrote E2E tests for the pallet on Westend Asset Hub (PET#592), exercising it against live chain state rather than in isolation.

pallet-recovery review

The revamped pallet-recovery (SDK#10482) handles account inheritance. As part of reviewing the pallet, I wrote E2E tests covering its lifecycle and failure modes (PET#602, merged). The tests were run against a WASM override of Westend Asset Hub to exercise the pallet's integration before it lands on production.

XCM type definitions

The SDK introduced a new ConcatenatedOpaqueVersionedXcm variant for double-encoded XCMs (SDK#9588), but the polkadot-js type definitions were missing it. This caused HRMP message decoding to fail with "Unable to create Enum via index 3" — breaking tooling that parses cross-chain messages. I added the missing variant to the XcmpMessageFormat enum (polkadot-js/api#6255, awaiting review).

Supporting work

While not directly within the Manifesto's scope, I continued work on Polkadot Ecosystem Tests (PET) and upstream Chopsticks improvements that support my protocol testing efforts:

• Added E2E tests for pallet-psm on Westend Asset Hub (PET#592), complementing the SDK-level testing with integration tests against live chain state
• Contributed performance and correctness improvements to Chopsticks (#1028) including RPC caching, request coalescing, and a batched dry-run API
• Re-enabled XCM tests broken by the ConcatenatedOpaqueVersionedXcm format change (PET#613), which led directly to the polkadot-js/api type fix above

Voting record

Ranks	Activity thresholds	Agreement thresholds	Member's voting activities	Comments
I	90%	N/A	N/A	No referenda to vote on
II	80%	N/A
III	70%	100%
IV	60%	90%
V	50%	80%
VI	40%	70%