Who Is Gavin Wood?

Gavin Wood is the co-founder of Parity Technologies, a blockchain company that aims to build a new framework for decentralized apps (DApps), and president and founder of the Web3 Foundation, an advocacy group for the decentralization of the internet. Gavin Wood once worked with Vitalik Buterin as one of Ethereum's co-founders and chief technology officer (CTO). 

Gavin was known for his involvement in the development of the first functional Ethereum implementation, as well as initially proposing and writing the code for its smart contract programming language Solidity, which is the same language that Ethereum currently uses. Additionally, he also released the yellow paper of the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM). 

After cutting ties with Ethereum in 2016, Gavin’s focus moved toward a new project called Polkadot, a multi-chain blockchain ecosystem aimed at helping developers build new DApps that are interoperable, which initially launched in May 2020. Unlike Ethereum, Polkadot gives developers the ability to choose how much to charge in transaction fees and how fast blocks can be confirmed.

Gavin’s goal is to help link private and public blockchains to make it easier for projects to conduct transactions with each other frictionlessly despite network differences.