| Report Date | 2026/06/20 |
| Submitted by | Dónal Murray |
@donal:parity.io2024/06/022025/04/11Polkadot Hub, Agile Coretime, economic infrastructureI have been working full time as a Polkadot core dev since late 2023. I think I can split the last ~3 years into 3 distinct eras of involvement and ownership:
I think these three examples cleanly demonstrate both my impact on the Polkadot network and growth over time.
The Rank 3 requirements state:
becoming a Fellow indicates the individual has enough knowledge and skill to build substantial protocol components alone and with high expectations that they will be completed correctly and to a high standard.
I owned the implementation and launch of the Coretime Chain and helped with the wider launch of Agile Coretime, including the Polkadot Coretime Chain runtime, the Polkadot Agile Coretime launch referendum, and post-launch remediation such as the lease migration fix and Kusama Coretime migration postmortem.
Agile Coretime fundamentally changed how resources are acquired and allocated on Polkadot, lowering the barrier to entry and enabling different usage patterns which were not before possible. I wrote and reviewed code, set up the chains and co-ordinated with community infrastructure providers and played a key part in the launch of the protocol. I remain one of the owners of Agile Coretime.
The Rank 3 expectations state:
Either played a supporting role in the ideation and a primary role in the formalisation of a major protocol component; or played a supporting role in the code-design and a primary role in the implementation of a major protocol component.
I led the Asset Hub Migration (AHM), which was to my knowledge the largest on chain migration attempted on any blockchain network. AHM worked towards a transactionless relay, improved developer and user experience, and paved the way for Polkadot's transition to JAM.
I led more than a year of planning, design, implementation, testing and preparatory comms before execution, working with many contributors across multiple domains. This included deploying the temporary Asset Hub Next chain and building the scaffolding for repeatable AHM dry-run tooling including end to end testing. We delivered the migration successfully with minimal disruption.
The Rank 3 expectations state:
The individual should by now be thinking very much in a security-conscious, game-theoretic way.
I currently lead the research of new economic infrastructure on the network and the protocol changes required to enable it, including stablecoin infrastructure and related mechanisms, and the staking system. This work requires reasoning about incentives, adversarial behaviour, economics, and long-term protocol security as well as the technical and philosophical aspects.
This work is mature but still in flight.
The Rank 3 requirements state:
Demonstrable presence of knowledge sharing within the ecosystem.
I have given talks on some topics that I have worked on over the years, most notably Agile Coretime around the time of its launch to educate the ecosystem and builders about what the changes would be, including a Space Monkeys interview, a sub0 talk, and a Polkadot Decoded talk on Agile Coretime economics.
I regularly collaborate with other people in the ecosystem, both non technical and technical.
AHM was a breaking change for the network affecting every builder, user and entity who interfaced with the chain. This required a long campaign of education and communication to ensure the migration was a success for the network.
On the technical front I currently lead a team of ten engineers working on the Polkadot Hub, as well as collaborating with other contributors across multiple domains.
Across these areas, my code and review contributions can be found on GitHub: polkadot-sdk authored PRs, runtimes authored PRs, polkadot-sdk reviews, and runtimes reviews.
I have been involved in the workings of the fellowship and runtimes ownership, runtime upgrades and incident response across multiple areas of the protocol since mid 2024 when I first joined the fellowship.
I believe my contributions demonstrate the technical expertise, judgement and responsibility expected of a Fellow and therefore am putting myself forward for promotion to rank 3 via the fast promote track.
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Comment(s): Although I was inducted into the fellowship in June 2024 and spent around 9 months at rank 1, my last retention referendum, although passing, did not execute before my demotion period and I was bumped. This on-chain gap has not affected my activity and involvement in pushing Polkadot forward.
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