# paritytech/polkadot-bulletin-chain — health index 19/100 (Critical)

> Inspection of the public repository paritytech/polkadot-bulletin-chain by inspect.software. It holds a health index of 19 out of 100, placing it in the Critical band. The index is a signal derived from publicly visible practice, not a warranty, a security audit, or an endorsement, and it is independent of payment.

- Repository: https://github.com/paritytech/polkadot-bulletin-chain
- Report page: https://inspect.software/software/paritytech/polkadot-bulletin-chain
- Full JSON report: https://inspect.software/api/repositories/paritytech/polkadot-bulletin-chain/report
- Badge: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/inspect-software/badges/main/v1/p/paritytech/polkadot-bulletin-chain.svg
- Inspected: 2026-09-18
- Methodology: metrics 2.10.0, report schema 0.34.0 (https://inspect.software/methodology.md)

## Category summary

| Category | Weight | Index | Band |
|---|---|---|---|
| Vitality | 21% | 95/100 | Exceptional |
| Community & Adoption | 17% | 56/100 | Moderate |
| Sustainability & Governance | 23% | 88/100 | Excellent |
| Engineering Quality | 19% | 86/100 | Excellent |
| Security | 16% | 31/100 | At Risk |
| AI Readiness | 4% | 95/100 | Exceptional |

The weighted overall 75 is calibrated to 89 on the published index scale (record calibration 2026-08-02). A dependency reported as a malicious package applies a 35% multiplier to weighted overall health and gives it a Critical ceiling of 19.

## Repository facts

| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Description | The Bulletin Chain is a parachain providing distributed data storage and retrieval infrastructure for the Polkadot ecosystem. |
| Classification | library, web-ui, cli |
| Homepage | https://paritytech.github.io/polkadot-bulletin-chain/ |
| Primary language | Rust |
| License | GPL-3.0 |
| Stars | 19 |
| Forks | 19 |
| Created | 2024-10-29 |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 |
| Latest release | v0.0.26-paseo |
| Commits (last year) | 407 |
| Bus factor | 4 |

## Published packages

| Registry | Package | Latest | Monthly downloads |
|---|---|---|---|
| crates | bulletin-pallets-common | 0.12.0 | 3,083 |
| npm | @parity/bulletin-sdk | 0.4.0 | 4,257 |
| crates | pallet-bulletin-data-renewal | 0.12.0 | 2,913 |
| crates | pallet-bulletin-hop-promotion | 0.12.0 | 3,036 |
| crates | pallet-bulletin-transaction-storage | 0.12.0 | 3,069 |

## Vitality — 95/100 (Exceptional)

Is the project alive — is code being written and are releases shipping? Weight: 21% of the overall index.

### Development activity — 99/100 (Exceptional)

| Criterion | Status | Points | Detail |
|---|---|---|---|
| Push recency | met | 36 / 36 | last push 0 days ago |
| Commit cadence | partial | 35.3 / 36 | 51/52 weeks with commits |
| Commit volume | met | 18 / 18 | 407 commits in the last year |
| OpenSSF Scorecard: Maintained | met | 10 / 10 | 30 commit(s) and 14 issue activity found in the last 90 days -- score normalized to 10 |

### Release discipline — 90/100 (Excellent)

| Criterion | Status | Points | Detail |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ships releases | met | 27 / 27 | 47 releases published |
| Release recency | met | 36 / 36 | latest release 25 days ago |
| Release cadence | met | 27 / 27 | a release every ~2 days |
| OpenSSF Scorecard: Signed-Releases | not met | 0 / 10 | Project has not signed or included provenance with any releases. |

### Abandonment — 100/100 (Exceptional)

| Criterion | Status | Points | Detail |
|---|---|---|---|
| Project is still maintained | met | 100 / 100 | last human commit 0 days ago |

## Community & Adoption — 56/100 (Moderate)

Does the project have users, downloads, attention, and a welcoming setup for contributors? Weight: 17% of the overall index.

### Popularity & adoption — 34/100 (At Risk)

| Criterion | Status | Points | Detail |
|---|---|---|---|
| Stars | partial | 20.4 / 60 | 19 stars |
| Forks | partial | 10.5 / 25 | 19 forks |
| Watchers | partial | 2.7 / 15 | 4 watchers |

### Community health — 70/100 (Good)

| Criterion | Status | Points | Detail |
|---|---|---|---|
| README | met | 22.5 / 22.5 | — |
| License | met | 22.5 / 22.5 | recognized license (GPL-3.0) |
| CONTRIBUTING guide | met | 18 / 18 | — |
| Code of conduct | not met | 0 / 13.5 | — |
| Issue template | not met | 0 / 7.2 | — |
| PR template | not met | 0 / 6.3 | — |

### Ecosystem adoption (downloads) — 70/100 (Good)

Excluded from scoring (no data or not applicable): Registry dependents. Remaining weights renormalized.

| Criterion | Status | Points | Detail |
|---|---|---|---|
| Monthly downloads | partial | 56.2 / 80 | 16,358 downloads/month across crates, npm |
| Registry dependents | excluded | 0 / 20 | not reported by this ecosystem |

## Sustainability & Governance — 88/100 (Excellent)

Will the project survive its people — bus factor, responsiveness, who backs it, and package upkeep? Weight: 23% of the overall index.

### Maintainer resilience (bus factor) — 85/100 (Excellent)

| Criterion | Status | Points | Detail |
|---|---|---|---|
| Bus factor | partial | 43.2 / 54 | 4 contributor(s) cover half of all commits |
| Commit distribution | partial | 18 / 22.5 | top contributor authored 20% of commits |
| Contributor breadth | met | 13.5 / 13.5 | 32 contributors |
| OpenSSF Scorecard: Contributors | met | 10 / 10 | project has 5 contributing companies or organizations |

### Issue & PR responsiveness — 71/100 (Good)

| Criterion | Status | Points | Detail |
|---|---|---|---|
| Issue resolution | partial | 27.2 / 42 | 65% of issues closed |
| PR acceptance | partial | 24.2 / 30 | 448/555 decided PRs merged |
| Newcomer PR acceptance | partial | 4.3 / 13 | 1/3 first-time contributors' PRs merged in 30d |
| OpenSSF Scorecard: Code-Review | met | 15 / 15 | all changesets reviewed |

### Ownership & stewardship — 99/100 (Exceptional)

| Criterion | Status | Points | Detail |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ownership backing | met | 30 / 30 | organization-owned |
| Verified domain | met | 20 / 20 | — |
| Owner reach | partial | 23.8 / 25 | 2,067 followers of paritytech |
| Track record | met | 25 / 25 | 790 public repos, account ~11 yr old |

### Package maintenance — 100/100 (Exceptional)

| Criterion | Status | Points | Detail |
|---|---|---|---|
| Published & resolvable | met | 25 / 25 | 5 package(s) on crates, npm |
| Publish recency | met | 35 / 35 | latest publish 25 days ago |
| Version history | met | 20 / 20 | 12 published versions |
| Not deprecated | met | 20 / 20 | active, not deprecated or yanked |

## Engineering Quality — 86/100 (Excellent)

Are baseline engineering and documentation practices in place? Weight: 19% of the overall index.

### Engineering practices — 84/100 (Excellent)

| Criterion | Status | Points | Detail |
|---|---|---|---|
| CI workflows | met | 24 / 24 | 17 workflow(s) |
| Tests present | met | 24 / 24 | — |
| Linter config | met | 16 / 16 | biome.json, rustfmt.toml |
| Pre-commit hooks | not met | 0 / 9.6 | — |
| .editorconfig | not met | 0 / 6.4 | — |
| OpenSSF Scorecard: CI-Tests | met | 20 / 20 | 30 out of 30 merged PRs checked by a CI test -- score normalized to 10 |

### Documentation — 90/100 (Excellent)

| Criterion | Status | Points | Detail |
|---|---|---|---|
| README | met | 30 / 30 | — |
| Documentation directory | met | 25 / 25 | — |
| Documentation / homepage site | met | 15 / 15 | https://paritytech.github.io/polkadot-bulletin-chain/ |
| Repository description | met | 10 / 10 | — |
| Topics | not met | 0 / 10 | — |
| Wiki | met | 10 / 10 | — |

## Security — 31/100 (At Risk)

Are visible security and supply-chain practices strong, with no malicious dependency and no unresolved high-risk jurisdiction exposure? Weight: 16% of the overall index.

### Security posture — 19/100 (Critical)

Excluded from scoring (no data or not applicable): Branch-Protection. Remaining weights renormalized. A dependency reported as a malicious package applies a 35% multiplier to Security posture and gives it a Critical ceiling of 19.

| Criterion | Status | Points | Detail |
|---|---|---|---|
| Binary-Artifacts | met | 7.5 / 7.5 | no binaries found in the repo |
| Branch-Protection | excluded | 0 / 7.5 | internal error: error during branchesHandler.setup: internal error: some github tokens can't read classic branch protection rules: https://github.com/ossf/scorecard-action/blob/main/docs/authentication/fine-grained-auth-token.md |
| CI-Tests | met | 2.5 / 2.5 | 30 out of 30 merged PRs checked by a CI test -- score normalized to 10 |
| CII-Best-Practices | not met | 0 / 2.5 | no effort to earn an OpenSSF best practices badge detected |
| Code-Review | met | 7.5 / 7.5 | all changesets reviewed |
| Contributors | met | 2.5 / 2.5 | project has 5 contributing companies or organizations |
| Dangerous-Workflow | not met | 0 / 10 | dangerous workflow patterns detected |
| Dependency-Update-Tool | met | 7.5 / 7.5 | update tool detected |
| Fuzzing | not met | 0 / 5 | project is not fuzzed |
| License | met | 2.5 / 2.5 | license file detected |
| Maintained | met | 7.5 / 7.5 | 30 commit(s) and 14 issue activity found in the last 90 days -- score normalized to 10 |
| Packaging | met | 5 / 5 | packaging workflow detected |
| Pinned-Dependencies | partial | 4.5 / 5 | dependency not pinned by hash detected -- score normalized to 9 |
| SAST | not met | 0 / 5 | SAST tool is not run on all commits -- score normalized to 0 |
| Security-Policy | met | 5 / 5 | security policy file detected |
| Signed-Releases | not met | 0 / 7.5 | Project has not signed or included provenance with any releases. |
| Token-Permissions | not met | 0 / 7.5 | detected GitHub workflow tokens with excessive permissions |
| Vulnerabilities | not met | 0 / 7.5 | 55 existing vulnerabilities detected |

### Dependency advisories — 79/100 (Good)

Excluded from scoring (no data or not applicable): Indirect dependencies free of known advisories. Remaining weights renormalized. Matched 2524 resolved dependencies against OSV; 18 could not be assessed (no resolved version, an unsupported ecosystem, or beyond the reported package list). This repository publishes no package the index resolves, so the repository dependency graph was assessed instead. That graph mixes development and test pins with shipped dependencies, so only the declared runtime dependencies are scored; transitive findings are reported as context and excluded from the score. Reachability is not analyzed.

| Criterion | Status | Points | Detail |
|---|---|---|---|
| Direct dependencies free of known advisories | partial | 22.6 / 35 | 6 affected: rand 0.8.5 (low), rand 0.9.2 (low), tracing-subscriber 0.2.25 (low), +3 more |
| Indirect dependencies free of known advisories | excluded | 0 / 25 | transitive set not separable from development and test dependencies in this scope |
| No advisories left outstanding | partial | 36.4 / 40 | 4 advisory-carrying package(s) unaddressed past 90 days; oldest published 384 days ago |

### Malicious dependencies — 35/100 (Weak)

1 resolved dependency(ies) resolve to a version the registry still serves and the OpenSSF corpus reports as malicious. Direct and indirect are treated alike: an install-time payload runs at any depth in the graph. A report here concerns the package as published, not the maintainers of this repository, which may have resolved it unknowingly.

| Criterion | Status | Points | Detail |
|---|---|---|---|
| No dependency reported as a malicious package | partial | 35 / 100 | 1 reported as malicious: fs 0.0.1-security |

### High-Risk Jurisdiction Exposure — 100/100 (Exceptional)

Only high-confidence self-published location evidence affects this multiplier. Ambiguous matches are review-only; country evidence is not proof of nationality, citizenship, legal registration, malicious intent, or sanctions status.

| Criterion | Status | Points | Detail |
|---|---|---|---|
| Policy exposure multiplier | met | 100 / 100 | no confirmed policy-scope location match |

## AI Readiness — 95/100 (Exceptional)

How well is the repo equipped to be developed and maintained with AI coding agents? Carries a deliberately small weight: agent tooling is a real maintenance signal, but its absence must never gate the top of the scale (calibration saturates at raw 91, so 100/100 remains reachable with AI Readiness at zero).

### Agent context & guidance — 100/100 (Exceptional)

| Criterion | Status | Points | Detail |
|---|---|---|---|
| Agent instructions | met | 45 / 45 | CLAUDE.md |
| Machine-readable docs (llms.txt) | met | 15 / 15 | llms.txt served by the project website (https://docs.polkadot.com/llms.txt) |
| Legible commit history | met | 40 / 40 | 74 of 76 human commits state their intent (structured subject or explanatory body) |

### Verify loop (build / test / typecheck) — 89/100 (Excellent)

| Criterion | Status | Points | Detail |
|---|---|---|---|
| One-command bootstrap | met | 18 / 18 | console-ui/justfile, examples/justfile, justfile |
| Automated tests | met | 22 / 22 | — |
| Lint / format config | met | 11 / 11 | biome.json, rustfmt.toml |
| Static type checking | met | 11 / 11 | console-ui/tsconfig.json, sdk/typescript/tsconfig.json |
| Reproducible environment | met | 10 / 10 | lockfile |
| Demonstrated agent practice | not met | 0 / 10 | no agent-authored commits among the last 100 |
| Automated maintenance | met | 8 / 8 | 24 of the last 100 commits are automated dependency updates |
| OpenSSF Scorecard: Pinned-Dependencies | partial | 9 / 10 | dependency not pinned by hash detected -- score normalized to 9 |

### Code legibility for models — 99/100 (Exceptional)

| Criterion | Status | Points | Detail |
|---|---|---|---|
| Type-checkable code | met | 45 / 45 | Rust (statically typed) |
| Manageable file sizes | partial | 53.6 / 55 | 6/236 source files over 60KB |

### Machine-readable interfaces — 100/100 (Exceptional)

Excluded from scoring (no data or not applicable): MCP server. Remaining weights renormalized.

| Criterion | Status | Points | Detail |
|---|---|---|---|
| API schema (OpenAPI/GraphQL/proto) | met | 40 / 40 | stress-test/proto/bitswap.v1.2.0.proto, zombienet-sdk-tests/proto/bitswap.v1.2.0.proto |
| MCP server | excluded | 0 / 20 | not applicable to this kind of software |
| Runnable examples | met | 40 / 40 | examples |

## Collection warnings

- Star history unavailable: GitHub GraphQL error: Resource not accessible by personal access token
- Could not fetch crates package 'bulletin-stress-test' from its registry
- Could not fetch npm package 'bulletin-console-ui' from its registry
- Could not fetch crates package 'bulletin-chain-zombienet-sdk-tests' from its registry
- Could not fetch crates package 'bulletin-sdk-rust' from its registry
- Could not fetch crates package 'bulletin-paseo-runtime' from its registry
- Could not fetch crates package 'bulletin-westend-runtime' from its registry

## What this report is

inspect.software measures public repositories against a single published, versioned methodology and reports the result as a 1–100 health index. Findings are signals derived from what is visible in public repository data — they are not a security audit, a warranty, or an endorsement, and no result depends on payment.

- Methodology, formulas and weights: https://inspect.software/methodology.md
- What a result does and does not claim: https://inspect.software/wiki/signals-not-warranties.md
- Rating bands: https://inspect.software/wiki/scoring-bands.md
- Corrections: https://inspect.software/contact.md
- Index of all documents: https://inspect.software/llms.txt