Argument-0009: Retention at Rank 2

Report Date	Date of submission (2026/06/25)
Submitted by	Christian Langenbacher

Member details

• Matrix username: @clang:matrix.org
• Polkadot address: 16YCL3UVpVWQLGW3p3Zx4k5WAEp9W1DwdDnxAbyAaPxVxnp3
• Current rank: 2
• Date of initial induction: 2024/03/27
• Date of last report: 2026/03/25
• Link to last report: 0008 Retention at Rank II
• Area(s) of Expertise/Interest: Parachain Builder, Runtime, Clients

Reporting period

• Start date: 2026/03/25
• End date: 2026/06/25

Argument

My argument primarily revolves around PRs and issues that I filed in the Polkadot SDK and Runtimes repositories.

Finalizing the Penpal Asset Management revamp

In my last report I described the in-progress revamp that establishes PEN as Penpal's first-class native token while treating DOT as a foreign asset (polkadot-sdk#10726).

Over this period I brought that work to completion and propagated it into the Runtimes repository's integration tests: Each affected test spans multiple chains (Asset Hub Westend/Rococo, Bridge Hub Westend/Rococo) and had to be reviewed individually to ensure invariants and coverage were preserved. The changes mirror the polkadot-sdk integration-test changes one-to-one, so no surprises were found: the original PSDK design ported over cleanly and required no rework.

Insights from the above work inspired me to make a minor refactoring PR to centralize some helper functions upstream, which was very swiftly followed up by bkontur to propagate them to the Runtimes repository in the next release.

A minor issue was found after the first Asset Management revamp. The Penpal genesis presets failed to build in production due to the ED not being respected (pre-existing bug). I future-proofed a fix by adding preset unit tests making sure that the genesis presets always build to prevent annoyances in production.

Triaging and reducing the Runtimes TODO backlog

The Runtimes repository carries a long-standing tracking issue for TODOs and leftovers. I picked this up and produced a full triage of every TODO/FIXME marker in the codebase: 56 markers in total, of which 21 carried no tracking reference and 27 seemed actionable at first glance, showing the value of categorizing, triaging and tracking them more systematically.

I went ahead and addressed some of those (PRs still pending merge) by simply switching to PSDK upstream code (#1213, #1214, #1217), and investigating and fixing an old failing test #1216.

I also proposed a lightweight CI check that requires every TODO/FIXME to carry a tracking-issue reference on the same line to prevent future build-up of hidden TODOs.

Additional contributions

I remained involved in 7 Polkadot SDK issues and 7 Runtimes issues over the period, and continued to assist community members with technical questions in the Fellowship and ecosystem Element channels.

Voting record

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

Misc

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