Retain George at rank 3

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Evidence for Retention

Argument-0010: Retention at Rank 3

Report Date Date of submission 2026/09/02
Submitted by George Pisaltu

Member details

  • Matrix username: @george.pisaltu:parity.io
  • Polkadot address: 128pmEUBSGjGeXZXNaAmomAJgVn77L74YT7Zdjd3fP63HWNP
  • Current rank: 3
  • Date of initial induction: 2024/08/16
  • Date of last report: 2026/02/24
  • Link to last report: https://github.com/polkadot-fellows/Evaluations/pull/259
  • Area(s) of Expertise/Interest: Proof of Personhood, System Parachains, FRAME

Reporting period

  • Start date: 2026/02/24
  • End date: 2026/09/02

Argument

Since my last argument letter, I continued to lead the Proof of Personhood effort. As stated in my promotion argument, the project became public under the name individuality-community. We have already partially integrated it into the runtimes in PR 1233. I was involved in the design and delivery of all of the components which were first showcased at the Web3 Summit and are now making their way onto Polkadot.

The manifesto expects a Fellow to

be able and willing to support that which they built given that it is running 24/7 on a public network.

Most of the items listed below run on the Paseo testnets we operate for the teams building on top of them, and are now either in the Polkadot runtimes, pending a runtime upgrade, or planned for the next upgrade (mostly DIM2-related logic). I have been the main point of contact for the developers integrating it and I intend to remain the owner of these components once they are live on Polkadot.

Member set as a service

The ring management logic effort from my last argument, as seen in pallet-members, is now used in a variety of new pallets other than pallet-people such as pallet-coinage, pallet-alias-accounts, pallet-pgas, pallet-members-subscriber/pallet-members-notifier, pallet-airdrop and pallet-people-airdrops. The abstraction of rings and proofs allowed us to transition all our features to preserve users' privacy.

I kept improving the pallet based on what we saw on testnets in terms of usage patterns and friction. The most visible change is self-inclusion: people who were recognized but stuck waiting for a full onboarding cohort had a poor experience, so a self-onboarding path was added which lets someone who waited long enough in the queue include themselves in a ring, with a configurable delay. I also fixed a phantom stale ring entry left behind on full ring suspensions and added authorized transactions for collection deletion. The public repository already has some more fixes, such as the suspension bypass in the game and the leaked sufficient reference on suspension.

PGAS and free execution for people on Asset Hub

People already got some free execution in terms of certain pallet calls through transaction extensions, but in order to give people free smart contract execution, the transaction extension wasn't enough, so I proposed PGAS, a sufficient and burnable fee asset which recognized people and lite people mint once per claim slot per day using Bandersnatch proofs to preserve each claim's privacy. I implemented the minting and distribution in pallet-pgas and supported the smart contracts team with PGAS storage deposits in pallet-revive. PGAS can now be used as a fee asset for all people-originated calls on the companion Asset Hub runtime and has since grown into a fee payment currency beyond smart contracts with plans to add expiry to each minted claim so that we avoid hoarding of this asset. Batch claims are in review.

Building on PGAS, I proposed paid alias accounts on Asset Hub in pallet-alias-accounts, where people and lite people bind a regular account to an alias in a custom context and pay for it in PGAS, so that applications which live in a smart contract get a stable alias account to interact with while the person stays anonymous, available for verification through personhood precompiles.

Anonymous allowances and rewards

Building on the pallet-resources work from last year, I implemented anonymous statement store allowances for people and lite people, where a member proves membership in a context made of a period and a slot and receives a temporary allowance for a statement account without linking it to their identity. I supported the same transition for the Bulletin chain allowances.

I designed and implemented pallet-airdrop to give DIM2 participants rewards for their involvement in the game. The new design uses VRF-based tickets and winners are chosen by entropy that nobody can influence and prizes are claimed anonymously. The next iteration of prizes is pallet-people-airdrops, which are out of band draws (unrelated to the game), intended for more frequent and smaller prizes. This mechanism is based on salt-derived tickets captured at scheduling time and the participant's alias in the pallet's context.

Supporting other efforts

I proposed the design of what would become pallet-dotns-gateway on Asset Hub, which allowed for free claiming of dotNS entries for both people and lite-people with only the XCM delay between PC and AH. I contributed to the architecture of the Honour system where I was a key reviewer. I pushed for the proof batch verification primitive in verifiable.

polkadot-sdk

Following up on Extrinsic Horizon, I opened a PR introducing the AccountLike trait and #[pallet::as_account], which lets pallets with custom origins expose an account and opt into nonce tracking and fee payment per origin variant, instead of each pallet writing its own transaction extension for replay protection. This is needed to make the free transaction model in FRAME easier to use beyond Signed. I refactored VerifySignature to fix an issue generic signers had with its previous encoding, and I proposed a sufficiency query in the fungibles traits.

My PRs authored and PRs reviewed in this period can be found on GitHub. The lists are incomplete, as most of the work happened in the private repository and the history was not preserved when the project was made public.

I hope this argument justifies my retention at rank 3 in the Fellowship.

Voting record

Ranks Activity thresholds Agreement thresholds Member's voting activities Comments
I 90% N/A
II 80% N/A
III 70% 100% I have voted on 34 out of 58 referenda in which I was eligible to vote (i.e. 59% voting activity). Out of 33 referenda in which members of higher ranks were in complete agreement, I have voted in line with the consensus 33 times (i.e. 100% voting agreement). 8 of the 58 referenda were M1 interview approvals for the JAM implementers prize, which I am not expected to vote on as I didn't participate in the interviews. Excluding those, I have voted on 34 out of 50 referenda (i.e. 68% voting activity). I acknowledge this is still below threshold.
IV 60% 90%
V 50% 80%
VI 40% 70%

Misc

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Status
Decision14d
Confirmation
1hr
Attempts
0
Tally
50%Aye
50%Nay
Aye0
Nay0
  • 10.00%
  • 0.0%

    Threshold

  • 0.0%
Bare Aye0
Max Voters5
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