The Incident

On 2026-02-19 10:46:18 (UTC), the Robonomics parachain on Polkadot stopped producing blocks following a major runtime and node
upgrade to v4.0. This upgrade was intended to transition the parachain consensus from OpenCollator to AURA.

The Issue

To prevent issue happens with Kusama parachain authorities storage item was set using TechComm voting.

But in this case runtime upgrade on well tested runtime fails because of unexpected runtime upgrade failure in Aura module:

Aura module expects authorities storage empty.

As result runtime upgrade interrupt block production with panic error.

Impact

The block production halt affects several Robonomics services:

Sensors.social currently operates in off-chain mode only
Democracy and TechComm motions are frozen
General degradation of parachain functionality

Proposed Solution

While this proposal is being voted on, the Robonomics team will prepare an updated runtime WASM (disable Aura initialization on runtime upgrade).

Unlocking the parachain will allow the manager account to perform a schedule_code_upgrade, enabling:

The relay chain to apply the corrected runtime code, and
Collators to temporarily use codeSubstitute in their chainspec to align with the updated runtime.

This will restore block production and return the parachain to normal operation.

Request

We respectfully ask Polkadot Governance and the Polkadot Fellowship to approve unlocking the Robonomics parachain so that full functionality can be restored.

After resolution, we will publish a public postmortem and implement strict runtime upgrade rules to prevent similar incidents in the future.