Pierre Krieger aka tomaka is one of biggest core contributors to Polkadot. He is the main author of the initial implementation of rust-libp2p. rust-libp2p is being used by Substrate for the networking stack. Pierre was also the main author of the initial implementation of the Substrate networking stack:
He was also maintaining and preparing the network stack for Polkadot over multiple years. While doing that he has also done other great contributions like HTTP requests support for offchain workers.
His most important project that he started and is still maintaining as the main author as of today is smoldot. Smoldot is the most advanced light client implementation that is, as the name suggests, a light client for Polkadot. Given the goals of Polkadot around decentralization and censorship resistance, smoldot is one of the most important projects in the Polkadot ecosystem for achieving these goals.
Besides that Pierre has also written the new JSONRPC spec that is light client first from the beginning. He is also quite active in helping to improve the Polkadot spec and has also done some RFCS.
Given all the work Pierre has done for Polkadot and the entire ecosystem, I propose that he gets invited to the fellowship and ranked up immediately to rank V at least. I would actually promote him to rank VI, but this requires a public referendum. As I can only vote for rank V right now, I propose to first add him to the fellowship as rank V and then rank him up to VI.
rust-libp2p, used in Substrate's networking.Threshold
Fellowship referendum 25 is up for vote, aiming to whitelist the proposal hash upgrading System Parachains to v9370. The community referendum can be found here: make sure to review and vote!