Argument-0288: Retention at Rank III

Report Date	2026/05/22
Submitted by	Oliver Tale-Yazdi

Member details

• Matrix username: @oliver.tale-yazdi:parity.io
• Polkadot address: 16a357f5Sxab3V2ne4emGQvqJaCLeYpTMx3TCjnQhmJQ71DX
• Current rank: III (Fellow)
• Date of initial induction: 2022/11/21
• Date of last report: 2025/11/19
• Area(s) of Expertise/Interest:
  • the Polkadot business-logic (aka the 'runtime')

Reporting period

• Start date: 2026/06/11
• End date: 2026/12/11

Argument

I argue to be worthy of rank III retention by proving fulfillment of the following requirements:

Manifesto 6.4 states:

a Fellow indicates the individual has enough knowledge and skill to build substantial protocol components (i.e. all but the major protocol components, e.g. a pallet or 2-10,000 line crate) alone and with high expectations that they will be completed correctly and to a high standard.

I modernized the recovery pallet as preparation for a deployment on the Polkadot Hub. I believe that any value-bearing system should have a recovery mechanism as a first-class citizen.

Further, I specced out the details of the Honour System and laid the basis for its implementation. I also helped with getting the necessary Host Functions for Ring-VRF batch verification and Multi-I/O VRF support rolled out to validators. The active set validators adopted these functions at a rate of 76.67% at the time of writing.
Sadly, a last-minute discovery of a bug in the cryptography code rendered them unusable, but a fix is in flight.

I am actively working on the security fuzzing initiative of the Fellowship to discover vulnerabilities earlier in our workflow. In the same vein, I supervise an external contributor to deploy the safe-mode pallets.

Manifesto 6.4 continues:

They should be able and willing to support that which they built given that it is running 24/7 on a public network. This means a commitment to availability even when it may be inconvenient for them and, in periods of lesser-availability, taking on a responsibility to make this clear to their team prior.

I helped with the recent emergency runtime releases, specifically with their implementation and deployment.

Other noteworthy contributions of mine to the ecosystem:

• dotless.xyz - issuance visualizer, featured by the official Polkadot Twitter account.
• Demoted non-voting Fellowship members, in line with the Manifesto, to maintain a healthy referenda quorum.
• Passed the first milestone (M1) of the JAM conformance fuzzer with our JAM client.

Voting record

Ranks	Activity thresholds	Agreement thresholds	Member's voting activities	Comments
III	70%	100%	≥ 97%	See Subsquare