Hey, I'm Bastian Köcher, a rank 6 Fellowship member. The Fellowship requires that members up to rank 6 apply for retention to stay at their rank; otherwise, they can be downgraded. Normally, these referendums are done within the Fellowship itself. To retain rank X, members of rank X+2 need to vote in favor of you. In my case, there are no members of rank 8+ who could vote for me. So, I need to use the Fellowship track to get approval from all the token holders.

At rank 6, I need to request retention every 6 months. This retention is for the time frame from September 2025 until March 2026.

My main focus at this time was on finishing the work on 500ms blocks. I delivered the work in two final pull requests #10315 and #10477. They are currently in the review phase, but I'm giving my best to nudge people to review them.

Besides my main work, I also helped with reviewing the AHM migration that was applied successfully on Polkadot and Kusama. In the context of the AHM migration, I also helped to identify and fix some issues with the testing of the migration. There was an issue with RocksDB taking too long in the tests.

I also helped with several critical bug fixes for Polkadot and Kusama. My work there was mainly helping to coordinate the releases.

Besides the work highlighted above, I'm also very active in maintaining the Fellowship runtimes repo by providing reviews, helping with releases, and proposing changes of my own. I'm also very active when it comes to on-chain voting in the Fellowship, such as opening retention and promotion proposals for many members. I have taken part in two in-person interview to promote fellowship members from rank two to rank three (the rank of a member, the first rank in which they get actual voting rights in the Fellowship).

Thank you!