Status Update - November 21, 2025

[timwu20]

General

Over the past period, the Gossamer team has been actively advancing work on Approval Checking Rewards, Speculative Availability, Anvil-based forking support (including AssetHub), WebRTC transport improvements for litep2p, and Polkadot-SDK dependency optimization. The updates below highlight concrete progress, open PRs, ongoing investigations, and close collaboration with Parity.

Team Updates

Since the Gossamer project has been paused and is no longer the primary focus, maintaining a high morale for the team presents a challenge. We want to keep you fully informed about some recent, relevant changes in our team composition.

freddyli7, who was contributing directly to our WebRTC initiative, has decided to pursue other opportunities. Additionally, P1sar, our Technical Project Manager, has chosen to resign effective at the end of October. While we do not have immediate replacements slated for these technical and leadership roles, we are actively developing contingency plans to ensure the project's continued stability and technical success.

To make the most strategic use of our resources and optimize our future engineering capacity, we will be redirecting any unspent funds towards the next year's budget. This is intended to allow us to invest in extra engineering hours in January, focusing on ongoing tasks.

Initiative Updates

Approval Checking Rewards

Work has progressed on the RewardsStatisticsCollector PR and we hope to get this merged very soon. Additions to the PR include:

• Zombienet tests to assert on metrics emitted from RewardsStatisticsCollector.
  • Includes malus nodes test, to ensure we are tallying no-shows.
• The feature is now behind a feature flag and defaults to not running the stastics collector.

We have started to edit the Correct Validator Rewards RFC to document the proposed solution of posting the tallies on-chain and calculating the rewards on Hub to distribute the rewards. Work has started on the code that posts the information on-chain. Working branches for both will be posted in this discussion as a follow up comment.

Speculative Availability

We spent a number of weeks debugging the zombienet tests and discovered that the erasure encoded chunks from speculative/early fetches were not actually being stored in the Availability Store subsystem. It was determined that the subsystem was rejecting the chunks because it listens on candidate events specifically for backed candidates to ensure chunks are only stored for backed candidates. After discussing with Parity we went ahead with a solution where we are adding a NoteBackableCandidate message to the AvailabilityStoreMessage enum to signal from Availability Distribution for early fetches. The working branch for this can be found on our ChainSafe fork of polkadot-sdk. We look to bring these changes back to the draft PR on paritytech/polkadot-sdk and restore the number of backed candidates to expected levels in the zombienet tests.

Anvil Forking Support

Lazy Loading Backend (Epic)

We have a PR that validates that we can replace the substrate Backend that supports lazy loading from an active chain. Components added include the ForkedLazyBackend, RPCClient trait, custom BlockImportOperation, and Blockchain for block storage. This lays the foundation required to enable forking support.

Forking Support (Epic)

We have a drafted PR that implements the RPCClient trait that we introduced. We are checking the client flag eth_rpc_url to determine if we run the ForkedLazyBackend in forking mode. Chain meta data requests are made to the remote, the runtime is fetched, and regenesis is performed. From there block production starts with manual sealing. Note that the current PR does not include support for manual sealing of AssetHub runtimes.

AssetHub Forking (Epic)

We added suppport for parachain host functions for the runtime environment. We utilized the AuraConsensusDataProvider in substrate, and started investigating and implementing a MockValidationDataInherentDataProvider that is used in block sealing. The AssetHub runtime does specific validation over both digests and inherents to validate the block. Mock data providers and digest providers need to be catered to support manual sealing of the AssetHub runtime specifically. Any additions via inherents and digests should not affect block sealing for the included development runtime in foundry-polkadot. We continue to work on this closely with the Parity engineers.

WebRTC

We have been making steady progress trying to improve litep2p WebRTC transport functionality to align with WebRTC-direct spec. An issue was created on litep2p repository to fix multistream negotiation for outbound substreams and opened a PR that addresses the issue.

We created another issue regarding litep2p not sending the FIN flag that was discovered when debugging smoldot <-> litep2p. The working branch of litep2p-perf that contains smoldot performance behaviour and browser automation to build the WASM and run it can be found on the ChainSafe fork of litep2p-perf.

We have also tried to address the performance between litep2p <-> libp2p WebRTC transports and noticed the transfer speeds degrading when running on our working branch. An issue was created on litep2p to track the work to improve performance when running the performance behaviour. We are currently working on this now.

Polkadot-SDK Dependency Optimization

• Added the duplicate deps check in zepter (the tool they use in polkadot-sdk CI) in this PR.
• Looking to merge the PR to bump schnorrkel to 0.11.5.
• Waiting for reviews on CI check for unused dependencies