Who’s Gavin Wood? The founding journey of Polkadot

Gavin Wood is an English computer programmer, co-founder of Ethereum, and creator of the Polkadot platform. Wood invented the Solidity programming language, wrote Yellow Paper for Ethereum Virtual Machine, and was the first Ethereum Foundation Chief Technology Officer (CTO). After leaving Ethereum in 2016, Wood co-founded Parity Technologies (formerly Ethcore), a core infrastructure development company for Ethereum, Bitcoin, Zcash, and Polkadot. Then Web3 Foundation, a non-profit organization focused on decentralized internet infrastructure and technology, started with the Polkadot network.

Gavin Wood As a teenager

Gavin Wood was interested in technology and game theory from an early age. Wood’s love for computers and technology. A neighbor in Lancashire County, Sean taught Wood to code his first computer program, and Lancaster Royal Grammar School teachers inspired Wood to pursue his passion. After graduating from Lancaster Royal Grammar School, Wood studied software engineering and master of engineering at the University of York.

After completing his Ph.D., Wood developed a next-generation cross-platform game engine for Frontier Developments. In 2007, Wood began writing Quid Pro Code. In this software store, Wood designed and implemented Martta’s first C++ language workbench while consulting with Microsoft Research on the technical aspects of the embedded domain-specific language.

In 2011, as Technical Director at Lancaster Logic Response (LLR), Wood used techniques from his Ph.D. research to develop a system for creating real-time light performances on music, deployed in one of London’s premier nightclubs. At LLR, Dr. Wood also participated in the development of Noted, a scalable C++ annotation and audio analysis environment.

Meet Vitalik Buterin and develop Ethereum

In 2013, Wood met Vitalik Buterin through a mutual friend and began working on a project that had nothing to do with his Ph.D. Later, Wood and Buterin studied decentralized platforms quite similar to the incumbent Bitcoin while differing significantly in their vision and pursuit of decentralization of the Internet.

“Since I was young, I have been very interested in economics and game theory. When I first read about Bitcoin in 2011, I wasn’t too interested in it because I was more attentive to its application in currencies than its technology. However, when I revisited it in early 2013, I realized that combining ITC and game theory could open up many new possibilities and bring about an inevitable series of social changes. Also, this year, a friend introduced me to Vitalik (the other founder of Ethereum), and Ethereum has occupied my entire life ever since.” – Gavin Wood.

In Miami in January 2014, Wood with Buterin, Charles Hoskinson, Anthony Di Iorio, Wendell Davies, and others implemented the first functionality of Ethereum (known as PoC-1 or alpha release). Five of them presented PoC-1 at the North American Bitcoin Conference in Miami in January 2014. Wood then became the co-founder and Chief Technology Officer of Ethereum. Also, the writer of Yellow Paper described the first official specification of the Ethereum Virtual Machine.

Over the next two years, Wood focused only on Ethereum development, including the general platform architecture, the majority of Ethereum C++ clients, and the original design of Solidity, an object-oriented programming language for writing smart contracts that Ethereum uses.

By 2016, Wood expanded his focus and founded EthCore, quickly raising seed money. With more than 60 developers across 15 countries, EthCore later became Parity Technologies.

Leave Ethereum and develop Parity and Web3 Foundation.

Two years after the founding of Ethereum, Wood continued to establish Parity Technologies, a decentralized web blockchain infrastructure company, along with former Ethereum employees Jutta Steiner (Head of Security Audit), Dr. Aeron Buchanan (Chief Financial Officer), and Ken Kappler (Head of External Affairs).

At Parity, Wood came up with the idea of a series of projects to innovate the current decentralized application landscape, such as Parity’s fastest and most advanced Ethereum client, DIY blockchain frameworks. One of them is Substrate, a flexible technology stack that allows users to build their Blockchain from the Scratch programming language.

Wood continues to maintain his vision for decentralized Internet with Ewald Hesse, Dr. Ana Trbovich, and 3 other blockchain pioneers in co-founding Grid Singularity, an open Internet-based decentralized energy data exchange platform built on blockchain technology. Wood also participated in decentralized asset management for multiple Blockchain with MelonPort AG in 2016.

Wood then established the Web3 Foundation to nurture technologies and applications in decentralized web software protocols to stabilize the Web3 ecosystem by applying modern cryptographic methods in decentralized networks. The Web3 Foundation supports Whisper protocol research that Wood has incubated since 2014, promising to enable private distributed messaging in Web 3.0 in the future.

“Four years ago, I coined the term “Web 3.0.” At that time, I knew very well: Ethereum, the platform I was involved in developing, allowed everyone to interact mutually beneficially without trusting each other. With message transmission and data publishing technology, we hope to build a peer-to-peer network that can do anything the Internet today can do without servers and no one has the authority to manage the flow of information.” – Gavin Wood.

While developing Parity Ethereum and awaiting the release of a new Ethereum specification, including sharding, Wood had begun to consider the obstacles of sharding that a blockchain would face. Wood took about four months to develop the vision for a heterogeneous multi-string framework: the Polkadot Protocol.

Founding of the Polkadot platform

Polkadot was first introduced in 2017 following efforts focused on Parity Technologies and the Web3 Foundation. Here, Wood describes Polkadot as a “super protocol,” in which only the last layer of Blockchain is fixed. Ethereum co-founder said that, when working on this floor, the implementation of governance is entirely feasible and other activities such as balancing, accounting, trading, and parachainment. According to Wood, Polkadot took advantage of this arrangement to upgrade its governance system independently.

Polkadot is designed to allow Blockchains to communicate with each other and facilitate automatic upgrades (as long as they are validated against certain specifications). Attached to a new form of administration in dot, the network’s internal token, which allows owners to vote on potential code changes, will then automatically upgrade across the network if consensus is reached.

Polkadot raised approximately $144 million in its first token sale in October 2017, with major investors including Boost VC, Pantera Capital, and Polychain Capital, as reported by WSJ.

After Polkadot, the next innovation is Substrate, the framework to effectively build your Blockchain and Kusama network independent of Polkadot but running on the same software that underpins advanced technology.

Kusama allows developers to explore the more complex things of Polkadot in a natural economy environment before launching their technology on the mainnet. The launch of Kusama proved valuable for the launch of Polkadot.

Polkadot, Web 3.0, and Gavin Wood’s complex blockchain network aim to bring it together and pioneer his vision of a world with an ‘Internet of Consensus.’ Considering Facebook’s and Google’s dominant control over our personal data, internet development seems like a logical pursuit.

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