Gavin Wood: Polkadot, Ethereum, and Kusama Co-founder

Gavin Wood Biography

Educational Background of Gavin Wood

Gavin Wood was born and brought up in Lancaster, England, UK. After completing his early education at Lancaster Royal Grammar School, he graduated from the University of York with a Computer Systems and Software Engineering degree in 2002.

Wood’s education did not stop there. He went on to study and complete his PhD in “Content-based visualization to aid common navigation of musical audio” in 2005. Having a Computer Systems and Software Engineering degree, Wood started his career as a research scientist at Microsoft.

Gavin Wood: The Serial Crypto Founder

Ethereum

Gavin Wood joined Vitalik Buterin, Charles Hoskinson, Anthony Di Lorio, and Joseph Lubin around 6 months before founding the Ethereum blockchain. With more than 25 years of coding experience, Gavin Wood’s skills played a crucial role in building Ethereum, which he referred to as “one computer for the entire planet”.

Wood is the one behind the popular blockchain programming language used by Ethereum, which is Solidity. He also published a paper on Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), explaining the runtime system of smart contracts in Ethereum. After serving as Ethereum’s first CTO for around 2 years, Wood left the Ethereum Foundation in 2016, thinking the blockchain was not doing enough to pursue a truly decentralized ecosystem.

Parity Technologies

While working with Ethereum, Wood founded EthCore, a software solution provider for industries that work on blockchain technology. It continued to expand with over 60 developers across several countries. By joining forces with Ethereum alumni, Dor. Jutta Steiner, Dr. Aeron Buchanan, and Ken Klapper, Wood turned EthCore into Parity technologies.

The main purpose of Parity technologies is to develop core blockchain infrastructure. At Parity, Wood worked on a wide variety of blockchain projects, including a flexible tech stack to help users build their own blockchains. The projects he worked on at parity include Grid Singularity, Blockchain Capital, Scytale Capital, and others.

Web3 Foundation

Wood continued to pursue his vision to build a decentralized internet by connecting with other blockchain pioneers. To nurture decentralized technologies and applications and to build a stabilized Web3 ecosystem, he founded a non-profit organization, the Web3 Foundation. One of the noteworthy projects of the Web3 Foundation is the “Whisper Protocol, which claims to enable private distributed messaging in the future Web3.

Polkadot

When Wood was working on a new Ethereum specification, which is sharding, he pondered over the issues a blockchain would face because of it. In around 4 months, Wood conceived the idea of a heterogeneous multi-chain framework and published the white paper of “Polkadot” blockchain.

With the combined efforts of Parity Technologies and the Web3 Foundation, Polkadot was launched in 2017. Polkadot works based on the Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus mechanism and its unique capability is to enable interoperability between blockchains. Its infrastructure helps developers to build their own blockchains called parachains, which can interact with each other.

Kusama

Following the ideation and the launch of Polkadot, Wood also founded Substrate and Kusama. While Substrate is a framework to help developers build their own blockchains, Kusama is a Canary network that runs on Polkadot despite being an independent network. The main purpose of Kusama is to prove the capabilities of Polkadot and its interoperability. However, Wood left Polkadot in 2022, to focus on building a blockchain that is relevant to the public.

Gavin Wood Net Worth and Personal Life

Gavin Wood’s net worth is estimated to be around $500 million as of 2023. As a co-founder of major blockchain projects, Ethereum and Polkadot, among the others, he amassed a significant portion of his wealth.

Apart from being a prolific software programmer, Wood is also a philanthropist at heart. He donated over $5.7 million in cryptocurrency to support Ukraine during the 2022 Russia-Ukraine war. This donation did not only help Ukraine but also emphasized the potential of cryptocurrencies to execute borderless and permissionless transactions.

The details of Wood’s personal life are unknown. He is not married and is not known to be in any relationship. Coming to his hobbies and personal preferences, Wood loves art, music, skiing, philosophy, and enjoys photography.