# Argument-0002: Retention at Rank I

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| **Report Date** | 2026/07/09                                                                                  |
| **Submitted by**| Diego Romero                                                                                |


## Member details

- Matrix username: @dimartiro:matrix.org
- Polkadot address: 5FZGEDktFdfGuUjYAbdSdjwt67pXf4UQHcyiW9Wk4hrYvxvY
- Current rank: I
- Date of initial induction: 2026/04/15
- Date of last report: 2026/04/16
- Link to last report: [Argument-0001: Promotion to Rank I](https://github.com/polkadot-fellows/Evaluations/blob/main/argument/dimartiro/0001-dimartiro-2026-04-promote-to-rank-I.md)
- Area(s) of Expertise/Interest:
    - Substrate
    - Networking (litep2p)
    - PolkaVM
    - Clients (Gossamer)
    - JAM


## Reporting period

- Start date: 2026/04/16
- End date: 2026/07/09


## Argument

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](https://github.com/paritytech/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](https://github.com/paritytech/litep2p/pull/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](https://github.com/paritytech/litep2p/pull/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](https://github.com/paritytech/litep2p/pull/631), pending review). On the maintenance side, I keep the security-critical dependency stack current: I upgraded sha2 to 0.11 ([#598](https://github.com/paritytech/litep2p/pull/598), merged) and opened a major upgrade of the QUIC/TLS/DNS stack — quinn 0.11, rustls 0.23, hickory-resolver 0.26 ([#603](https://github.com/paritytech/litep2p/pull/603), pending review) — keeping litep2p on maintained versions of the libraries it depends on for encrypted transport.

**Virtual machine — PolkaVM.** [PolkaVM](https://github.com/paritytech/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](https://github.com/paritytech/polkavm/pull/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](https://github.com/paritytech/polkavm/pull/396)); and an interpreter low-memory guard threshold that did not match the recompiler's memory-access guarding ([#395](https://github.com/paritytech/polkavm/pull/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](https://github.com/paritytech/polkadot-sdk/pull/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](https://github.com/paritytech/polkadot-sdk/pull/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](https://github.com/paritytech/polkadot-sdk/pull/9792), pending review). In FRAME, I am adding support in `pallet-assets` for asset accounts that persist independently of the existential deposit ([#12411](https://github.com/paritytech/polkadot-sdk/pull/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](https://github.com/paritytech/polkadot-sdk/pull/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](https://github.com/paritytech/trie/pull/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](https://github.com/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](https://github.com/polkadot-fellows/runtimes/pull/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](https://github.com/polkadot-fellows/runtimes/pull/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](https://github.com/polkadot-fellows/runtimes/issues/1138), [#1125](https://github.com/polkadot-fellows/runtimes/issues/1125), [#1115](https://github.com/polkadot-fellows/runtimes/issues/1115), [#1024](https://github.com/polkadot-fellows/runtimes/issues/1024), [#837](https://github.com/polkadot-fellows/runtimes/issues/837), [#719](https://github.com/polkadot-fellows/runtimes/issues/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.


## Voting record

|  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%   |   |  |