| Report Date | Date of submission (2026/06/23) |
| Submitted by | Branislav Kontur |
Bulletin, Bridges, XCM, System Parachains, governance, benchmarking, testing, integration, IPFS, BitswapThis summary outlines my activities, contributions, and collaborations during the reporting period (April–June 2026). Throughout the period I remained a core part of the team building Polkadot's storage stack, with a deep focus on the Bulletin Chain — concentrating on its productionalization, the release of its crates to crates.io, testing, and benchmarking — and keeping up substantial contributions across the Fellows runtimes and the Polkadot SDK.
My work on Bulletin spanned design, coordination, unblocking, and the harder cross-cutting pieces, which naturally results in fewer but more impactful changes.
A significant cross-cutting effort was the Hand-Off Protocol (HOP). I helped push its main implementation PR through to merge in the Polkadot SDK [1], and contributed to the design choices and integration along the way [2]. On the Bulletin side I helped with the HOP-based authorizations and the surrounding provider management, contributing to reviews, design and integration. Beyond HOP, I worked across the chain's productionalization — correctness and migration safety, testing, and console-ui operability [3] [4] [5] [6]. All of these changes were subject to expert code review and run on functional networks.
I participated in designing the JSON-RPC methods for Bitswap retrieval — bitswap_v1_get [7] and its streaming variant [8]; the original design document is internal, but it resulted in these public spec PRs.
This work paid off at Web3 Summit 2026, where the Bulletin Chain served as the storage backend for a number of live components — the t3rminal, the dotli / DotNS machinery, and the playground among them — running throughout the event without any issues. These components retrieved content over the Bitswap / litep2p path, with light-client access via the smoldot integration, exercising the full end-to-end storage and retrieval story under real, production-like load rather than a demo. This same stack is intended to carry forward into the production Polkadot deployment of Bulletin.
I drove the onboarding of the Bulletin Polkadot runtime into the Fellows runtimes [9], including the storage pallets and business-logic stage [10]. I identified and investigated a coretime-polkadot integration test failure [11] and an xcmp-queue benchmarking (bench bot / omni-bencher) regression [12], and I kept up ongoing cleanups and reviews across the runtimes — asset-hubs, collectives and the emulated tests [13] [14] — as part of a broader effort to align all runtimes [15].
To keep technical debt in check I opened an initiative to remove deprecated code across the SDK [16], which an external contributor then helped carry through a series of follow-up PRs. I also opened and investigated a frame-omni-bencher regression between stable2512 and stable2603 [17] that affected Fellows benchmarking, and contributed a generic-solution suggestion to the pallet-whitelist deferred-dispatch RFC discussion [18], which led to a separate RFC by Muharem [19].
Web3 Storage is a decentralized storage system built on Substrate with game-theoretic guarantees, where storage providers lock stake and face slashing for data loss while the chain acts as a credible threat rather than the hot path. I drove much of its MVP/Demo [20] by creating and triaging issues, pushing PRs, and reviewing others' work across the repository, and deployed it to PreviewNet. The design (by Robert Klotzner (@eskimor)) and demo were also successfully presented at Web3 Summit 2026 by Robert and Naren Mudigal (@mudigal).
I regularly invested time in sharing knowledge and enabling others. I acted as a technical point of contact and reviewer for Bulletin and Web3 Storage across teams, helped colleagues become self-sufficient with Bulletin deployments, and answered Bulletin and HOP questions in the relevant rooms. This included ongoing PR reviews across the Fellows [21] and other Polkadot-related [22] repositories. Throughout, I continued bridging discussions across teams and providing technical direction on storage, retrieval and deployment strategy.
Provide your voting record in relation to required thresholds for your rank.
| Ranks | Activity thresholds | Agreement thresholds | Member's voting activities | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| I | 90% | N/A | ||
| II | 80% | N/A | I have voted on 0 out of 0 referenda in which I was eligible to vote (i.e 0 % voting activity). | There were no referenda I could participate in during the reporting period |
| III | 70% | 100% | ||
| IV | 60% | 90% | ||
| V | 50% | 80% | ||
| VI | 40% | 70% |
Threshold