Gavin Wood is the founder of Polkadot and Parity Technologies, a co-founder of Ethereum, and the person who coined the term “Web3.”
Ethereum
Wood was a co-founder of Ethereum and its first CTO. He authored the Ethereum Yellow Paper — the formal technical specification of the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) — and built the first functional Ethereum client (written in C++). He also created Solidity, Ethereum’s primary smart contract programming language. Wood left the Ethereum Foundation in 2016.
Polkadot and Parity Technologies
In 2016, Wood founded Parity Technologies and began work on Polkadot, a multi-chain protocol designed to enable different blockchains to interoperate and share security. He published the Polkadot whitepaper in 2016, and the network launched in May 2020.
Polkadot uses a relay chain architecture where independent blockchains (called parachains) connect to a central relay chain that provides shared security and cross-chain messaging. Parachain slots were initially allocated through candle auctions.
Parity Technologies also built the Substrate framework, a modular toolkit for building custom blockchains that has been widely adopted beyond the Polkadot ecosystem.
Web3 Foundation
Wood founded the Web3 Foundation to fund and steward research and development of decentralized web technologies. His 2014 coinage of the term “Web3” — referring to a decentralized internet built on blockchain infrastructure — became one of the most widely used terms in the crypto industry.
Education
Wood holds a PhD in Computer Science from the University of York and a Master’s degree in Engineering from the same institution.