Gavin Wood

Gavin Wood is a British computer scientist and software engineer known for his role in building Ethereum and for founding the Polkadot network. As one of Ethereum's co-founders, he wrote the Ethereum Yellow Paper, the formal technical specification of the Ethereum Virtual Machine, and served as the first chief technology officer of the foundation that supported the project. He is also widely credited with popularizing the term Web3 for an internet built on blockchains.

After leaving Ethereum's core team, Wood founded Parity Technologies, a blockchain software firm, and the Web3 Foundation, which supports the development of Polkadot (DOT). His work has focused on interoperability between blockchains and on frameworks that let developers build their own chains. He holds a doctorate in computer science from the University of York.

Gavin Wood is one of the engineers who turned Ethereum from an idea into working software. If Ethereum is a worldwide computer that anyone can program, Wood wrote much of the original instruction manual explaining exactly how that computer should behave, and helped design one of the main programming languages people use to write software for it.

He later set out to build something different: a network designed to connect many separate blockchains so they could share security and pass messages. That project became Polkadot. Supporters see him as one of the most influential technical figures in crypto; critics point to a major software failure at his company in 2017.

Wood joined the Ethereum project in its early days, in late 2013 and early 2014, after it was proposed in a whitepaper by Vitalik Buterin. He wrote one of the first working Ethereum clients, in C++, and in 2014 published the Yellow Paper, which defined the protocol in precise mathematical terms so that independent teams could build compatible software. He also proposed Solidity, which became the most widely used language for writing smart contracts on Ethereum.

In 2014 he wrote an essay describing a "Web 3.0" in which applications would run on decentralized networks rather than on servers controlled by companies, and the shorter term Web3 later spread across the industry. Wood left the Ethereum Foundation in early 2016, the year after the network launched.

Wood co-founded the company that became Parity Technologies in 2015. It built the Parity Ethereum client, written in the Rust language, which for a time was one of the most popular alternatives to the Go-based Geth. Parity also developed tools for blockchains used by businesses.

In 2017 the company's multi-signature wallet software suffered two serious failures. In July, a flaw allowed an attacker to take ether from several wallets. In November, a user accidentally triggered a function that disabled a shared code library on which many multi-sig wallets depended, permanently freezing a large amount of ether, then worth well over 100 million dollars. Proposals to recover the funds through a change to Ethereum's rules were debated but never adopted. The incident remains one of the best-known examples of smart-contract risk, a theme covered under bug exploit.

Wood published the Polkadot whitepaper in 2016. Its design uses a central relay chain that provides shared security for many connected blockchains, which can then exchange messages and assets, an approach to blockchain interoperability. The Web3 Foundation, based in Switzerland, was set up in 2017 to fund research and oversee the network's launch, and it held a token sale that year. A test network, Kusama, launched in 2019, and Polkadot's main network followed in 2020. Parity built Substrate, a framework for creating new blockchains, which underlies Polkadot and many other projects.

Wood stepped back from leading Parity in 2022 while remaining involved in Polkadot's technical direction. In 2024 he presented a design known as JAM, the Join-Accumulate Machine, as a proposed evolution of the Polkadot relay chain.

• Technical legacy. The Yellow Paper and Solidity shaped how smart contracts are written across Ethereum and the many Ethereum-compatible blockchains.
• Multi-chain design. Polkadot helped popularize the idea of many specialized blockchains linked together, alongside other networks pursuing similar goals.
• Criticism. The 2017 wallet freeze damaged confidence in Parity's code, and some commentators have questioned how decentralized Polkadot's governance and token distribution are.

Wood is generally regarded as a researcher-builder rather than a public spokesperson, and he has spoken in favour of decentralization and of reducing reliance on large technology companies. Information here reflects public sources as of November 2026.

• Web3 Foundation
• Polkadot