# Argument-0004: Retention at Rank 3

|                 |                                                                                             |
| --------------- | ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| **Report Date** | Date of submission (2025/06/09)                                                             |
| **Submitted by**| Andrei Sandu                                                                        |

## Member details

- Matrix username: @sandreim:parity.io
- Polkadot address: 13QdJvnJgfoitjrxESwrCWTaLMN8KvXxufDUucXM6EWGuxqh
- Current rank: 3
- Date of initial induction: 2023/07/18
- Date of last report: 2024/11/29
- Area(s) of Expertise/Interest: Parachain Consensus, Node Performance Engineering, Observability,
Stress and integration testing

## Reporting period

- Start date: 2024/11/29
- End date: 2024/06/09

## Argument

This period's primary focus was Polkadot advocacy outside the ecosystem and ecosystem knowledge
sharing about Elastic Scaling. Code contributions targeted stability and resilience improvements.
Additionally, substantial time was dedicated to design and code reviews.

### Published articles

I've authored two long form, semi-technical articles promoting Polkadot's scalability outside of
the ecosystem:

- [Scalability² - The Stepping Stone to a Web3 Cloud](https://www.parity.io/blog/polkadot-web3-cloud)
positions Polkadot as the first Web3 cloud discussing similarities between Web2 and Web3 clouds.
- [Scaling Polkadot: Does it come at a price?](https://www.parity.io/blog/scalability-tradeoffs-polkadot-web3)
analyzes the strategic trade-offs Polkadot makes in comparison to a few competitors

A third article, currently in progress, will delve deeper into the technical aspects of the 2025/2026
roadmap, specifically focusing on enhancements in performance, resilience, and latency. Unfortunately,
this article was not completed within this reporting cycle.

### Knowledge sharing

I have been active in communicating about the status of Elastic Scaling by participating in OpenDev
calls, forum posts and in two calls I had with Distractive.

### Web3 gaming

I have been working closely with one of the largest ecosystem projects (Mythical Games) to optimize
their Web3 gaming platform. Together with my team I managed to increase the maximum TPS 3x,
building trust and confidence in Polkadot as the best place to host Web3 games.

To improve the Mythical teams' low level understanding of Polkadot I've hosted two presentations
focusing vertical and horizontal scalability, and how Polkadot secures parachains.

Currently, I am directly involved in fleshing out their long term architecture and vision that will
support running hundreds of games on Polkadot. While we are still in the early days, the solution
will clearly be built on top of a multi-chain architecture (one game one chain) leveraging elastic
scaling, bulk and on-demand core time.

### Improving the resilience of Polkadot

I've made a few [contributions](https://github.com/paritytech/polkadot-sdk/pulls?q=is%3Apr+author%3Asandreim+is%3Aclosed+merged%3A2024-12-12..2025-06-09+) which are mostly fixes and stability improvements.
The most significant is [enhancing collator observability](https://github.com/paritytech/polkadot-sdk/pull/8230)
which is part of a [larger effort](https://github.com/paritytech/polkadot-sdk/issues/7575) to improve
stabilize and lower parachain block times in H2 2025.

During this reporting period I have been involved in the handling of two major Polkadot and Kusama outages.
I've shared the knowledge and learnings from these incidents with the ecosystem via the forum
in these two postmortems: [Kusama finality stall](https://forum.polkadot.network/t/2025-05-09-kusama-dispute-storm-postmortem/12947) and
[Polkadot high block times](https://forum.polkadot.network/t/2025-05-03-polkadot-parachain-block-time-degradation/12963).

I've done design and code reviews of the revamp of the collator protocol as well
as the low latency parachain design drafted by Robert K. I will continue to support both of
these projects in the next reporting period.

## Voting record

|  Ranks | Activity thresholds | Agreement thresholds | Member's voting activities | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|
|III|70%   |100%  | 98.55% | 68 out of the 69 |

## Misc

- [ ] Question(s): 

- [ ] Concern(s): 

- [ ] Comment(s):