# Argument-0006: Retention at Rank 1

|                 |              |
| --------------- |--------------|
| **Report Date** | 2026/01/05   |
| **Submitted by**| Serban Iorga |


## Member details

- Matrix username: `@serban.iorga:parity.io`
- Polkadot address: `14oHMAJ5btnDCusHrTWraw1wTsLJwZeqPDLxusm1R1Zh3Vxa`
- Current rank: `1`
- Date of initial induction: `2024/04/22`
- Date of last report: `2025/09/24`
- Area(s) of Expertise/Interest:
    - `Bridges`
    - `BEEFY`
    - `MMR`
    - `Omni-Node`
    - `XCMP/HRMP/DMP`


## Reporting period

- Start date: `2025/09/24`
- End date: `2026/01/05`


## Argument

During this reporting period, I have been focusing on 2 main directions:

- I continued the work related to limiting and optimizing the heap memory usage in Polkadot. Here, a lot of the basic 
building blocks were already in place and during the previous reporting period I had opened a 
[new PR](https://github.com/paritytech/polkadot-sdk/pull/9480) for implementing the main objective of the milestone 
which is lazily decoding the extrinsics in a block. During this reporting period I followed through with this PR, 
polished it, addressed all the code review comments and finally merged it. The remaining work here is related to 
keeping track of the nested double-encoded structures as well: https://github.com/paritytech/polkadot-sdk/issues/8675 . 
I started working on this and I plan to open a PR soon.

- I started ramping up on the parachains core logic and I started contributing to the collators protocol 
revamp project. My most significant contributions here so far are related to the 
[main PR](https://github.com/paritytech/polkadot-sdk/pull/8541) that introduces the new collation manager 
and subsystem implementations. The PR had been opened by Alin a long time ago mostly as a draft, and I'm working on 
polishing it and getting it a state where it can be merged.




## Voting record

|  Ranks | Activity thresholds | Agreement thresholds | Member's voting activities                                                                                                                                                                                                                                  | Comments |
|---|---------------------|---|-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------|----------|
|I  | 90%                 |N/A   | I have voted on 0 out of 0 referenda in which I was eligible to vote. | -        |                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                            |          |
|II | 80%                 |N/A   |                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                             |          |
|III| 70%                 |100%  |                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                             |          |
|IV | 60%                 |90%   |                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                             |          |
|V  | 50%                 |80%   |                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                             |          |
|VI | 40%                 |70%   |                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                             |          |


## Misc

- [ ] Question(s):

- [ ] Concern(s):

- [ ] Comment(s):