Dr. Gavin Wood is a British computer scientist and software engineer who is one of the most significant technical architects in the blockchain industry. He is a co-founder of Ethereum, the founder of Polkadot and Kusama, and the creator of the term “Web3.” Wood is currently the Chief Architect at Parity Technologies, having stepped down as CEO in 2022 to focus on deep protocol development. He is widely credited with inventing the Solidity programming language and writing the Ethereum Yellow Paper, which formally defined the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM).
Overview
Wood is often described as the “technical conscience” of the crypto space, prioritizing robust engineering and decentralization over marketing. While Vitalik Buterin provided the vision for Ethereum, Wood provided the C++ implementation and the formal specification that made it a reality.
In 2016, Wood left the Ethereum Foundation to found Parity Technologies and the Web3 Foundation. His primary focus has since been solving the “scalability trilemma” through Polkadot, a sharded multi-chain network. In 2024, he unveiled the “Gray Paper” for the Join-Accumulate Machine (JAM), a new protocol design aimed at replacing the Polkadot Relay Chain with a more flexible, trustless supercomputer architecture.
Early Life and Education
Born in Lancaster, England, in 1980, Wood attended the Lancaster Royal Grammar School. He earned a Master of Engineering in Computer Systems and Software Engineering from the University of York in 2002. He continued his studies at York, completing a PhD in Computer Science in 2005. His doctoral thesis, titled “Content-based visualisation to aid common navigation of musical audio,” explored novel methods for human-computer interaction in music.
The Ethereum Era
Wood met Vitalik Buterin in late 2013 through a mutual friend. Fascinated by the white paper, he became one of Ethereum's co-founders and its first Chief Technology Officer (CTO). His contributions during this period were foundational to the entire industry:
- The Yellow Paper: Wood wrote the formal technical specification for Ethereum, effectively creating the “bible” for how the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) functions.
- Solidity: He proposed and developed the initial version of Solidity, the primary programming language used to write smart contracts today.
- PoC-1: He coded the first functional implementation of Ethereum in C++.
Polkadot and JAM
After leaving Ethereum, Wood founded Parity Technologies (originally Ethcore) to build core infrastructure for the decentralized web. Recognizing that a single blockchain could not scale to meet global demand, he designed Polkadot, a “Layer-0” protocol allowing different blockchains (parachains) to interoperate and share security.
In 2024, Wood introduced the JAM (Join-Accumulate Machine) protocol. JAM represents a significant evolution of his original vision, aiming to combine the flexibility of smart contracts with the scalability of parachains. It is designed to be a “global singleton permissionless object environment,” capable of processing massive parallel workloads without the bottlenecks of traditional blockchains.
Controversies and Challenges
Wood's career has faced significant hurdles, most notably the Parity Multi-Sig Wallet Hacks in 2017. A vulnerability in the Parity wallet code was exploited twice; the second incident resulted in a user accidentally “killing” a library contract, freezing over 500,000 ETH (worth hundreds of millions of dollars) permanently. This included funds belonging to Polkadot's treasury and Wood’s own company.
Despite the loss, Wood rejected proposals to fork Ethereum to recover the funds, adhering to the “code is law” philosophy. His leadership style is often characterized as intensely technical, which critics argue has sometimes made Polkadot difficult for average developers to approach compared to simpler ecosystems.
