| Report Date | 2026/07/09 |
| Submitted by | Diego Romero |
During this reporting period, the majority of my time went into the JAM (Join-Accumulate Machine) implementation in Go at ChainSafe. At the end of April I completed the Protocol Builders Program (PBP) in Lisbon — the in-person program that deepened my grounding in Polkadot's protocol internals — after which I took a few weeks of leave before returning to full-time contribution. Alongside the JAM work, I maintained a steady stream of upstream contributions across the Polkadot stack: networking (litep2p), the virtual machine (PolkaVM), the node and runtime (polkadot-sdk), the trie database, and the Fellowship runtimes. Below I present this work against the requirements and qualities the Manifesto sets out for Rank I (§6.2, "I Dan: Humble Member").
Among the Rank I requirements, §6.2.1 of the Manifesto states:
Substantially assisted in the analysis, or authoring of formalisation or implementation of a protocol component. [...] Implementation should be in a functional implementation of the protocol.
JAM — Go implementation (ChainSafe). My primary focus has been contributing to the Go implementation of JAM, the next-generation Polkadot protocol. Implementing the protocol independently from the Graypaper is squarely within the Fellowship's scope: it exercises the specification, surfaces ambiguities early, and strengthens client diversity for JAM from day one, so that the network does not launch dependent on a single implementation.
The first Rank I requirement in §6.2.1 asks for:
Three clear examples of a modest but substantial contribution to protocol development.
with "identifying and correcting a non-trivial issue in protocol code or formalisation" and "doing a valuable, innovative and insightful refactoring or simplification" among the examples the Manifesto itself gives. My upstream work this period contains several contributions of exactly that shape, presented below by area.
Networking — litep2p. litep2p is the networking library used by Polkadot nodes, so panics or wasted work in it directly affect the robustness and performance of the network. The library still contained internal unwrap/expect calls that could bring down a node under unexpected conditions; I replaced them with proper error propagation (#535, merged), so failures now surface as recoverable errors instead of crashes. While reading the transport layer I noticed that protocol names were being redundantly re-allocated on every substream open — a hot path — and optimized their construction to avoid those allocations (#607, pending review). I also found that the noise handshake read buffer was sized without accounting for the correct protocol overhead, and fixed the sizing (#631, pending review). On the maintenance side, I keep the security-critical dependency stack current: I upgraded sha2 to 0.11 (#598, merged) and opened a major upgrade of the QUIC/TLS/DNS stack — quinn 0.11, rustls 0.23, hickory-resolver 0.26 (#603, pending review) — keeping litep2p on maintained versions of the libraries it depends on for encrypted transport.
Virtual machine — PolkaVM. PolkaVM executes programs either through its interpreter or its recompiler, and any behavioural divergence between the two backends is a determinism problem: the same program must produce the same result regardless of which backend a node uses. I identified and fixed three such divergences, all currently pending review: an off-by-one in the recompiler's branch-target bounds check (#397); the recompiler decoding out-of-range register indices (nibbles 13–15) differently from the interpreter, which I aligned by clamping them to A5 (#396); and an interpreter low-memory guard threshold that did not match the recompiler's memory-access guarding (#395).
Node and runtime — polkadot-sdk. On the sync side, I diagnosed a bug where a warp-synced node that landed on a fork which was later reverted would get permanently stuck, and opened a fix (#12286, pending review). Related to that, warp sync configured with too few peer slots would silently fail to make progress; I made the node refuse to start in that misconfiguration so the operator finds out immediately instead of debugging a stalled sync (#12287, pending review). Continuing my earlier dependency-hygiene work, I proposed adding cargo udeps as a CI check so unused dependencies are caught automatically at CI time rather than accumulating in the workspace (#9792, pending review). In FRAME, I am adding support in pallet-assets for asset accounts that persist independently of the existential deposit (#12411, pending review). Finally, continuing my previous Snowbridge work, I opened a change that prunes outbound-queue-v2 message leaves from state once they are no longer needed, avoiding unbounded state growth (#12211, pending review).
Trie. I fixed a panic in TrieDBMut triggered when removing a key that is a strict prefix of another key (trie#232, pending review). The trie database is a core component of Polkadot's state storage, so hardening it against panics on legitimate inputs directly improves node reliability.
Fellowship runtimes and issue triage. In polkadot-fellows/runtimes, I opened the change removing the ConvictionVoting and Referenda pallets from the Polkadot relay chain as part of the ongoing minimal-relay-chain effort (#1187, pending review). I also noticed that the subweight CI comparison used the wrong baseline for PRs opened from forks, producing misleading weight diffs, and fixed it to compare against upstream main (#1197, pending review). Beyond code, I helped clean up the repository's issue backlog by revisiting stale issues, verifying whether they were still relevant, and helping get them closed (#1138, #1125, #1115, #1024, #837, #719).
Finally, §6.2 describes the primary qualities expected at this rank as "aspiration, knowledge-discovery, knowledge-sharing and active maintenance", together with "a broad understanding across the protocol". I believe this period reflects those qualities: the work above spans networking, the virtual machine, node sync, state storage, and the Fellowship runtimes, and combines feature and correctness work with sustained maintenance — dependency upgrades, CI improvements, and issue triage.
| Ranks | Activity thresholds | Agreement thresholds | Member's voting activities | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| I | 90% | N/A | N/A | There were no referenda available for my rank to vote on during the reporting period. |
| II | 80% | N/A | ||
| III | 70% | 100% | ||
| IV | 60% | 90% | ||
| V | 50% | 80% | ||
| VI | 40% | 70% |
Threshold