Polkadot co-founder Gavin Wood is relinquishing his chief executive role at Parity Technologies, an infrastructure provider that supports the crypto project. He will remain the company’s majority shareholder and chief architect.
(Bloomberg) — Polkadot co-founder Gavin Wood is relinquishing his chief executive role at Parity Technologies, an infrastructure provider that supports the crypto project.
He will remain the company’s majority shareholder and chief architect.
Wood, also a co-founder of Ethereum, helped give a high profile to the Polkadot platform, which allows multiple blockchains to talk to each other.
Polkadot’s DOT token has a market value of $6.8 billion, making it the 11th biggest cryptocurrency according to data from CoinGecko.
“The role of CEO has never been one which I have coveted (and this dates back long before Parity),” Wood said in a statement provided to Bloomberg.
“I can act at being a CEO well enough for a short while, but it’s not where I’m going to find eternal happiness.” Björn Wagner, Parity co-founder, will be the new CEO.
Wood, a British programmer who has a Ph.D.
in music visualization, joined in on Ethereum’s development a month after co-founder Vitalik Buterin issued his white paper. As Ethereum’s first chief technology officer, Wood was instrumental in creating features that made it appealing for developers.
But he felt that Ethereum’s design was ultimately limiting, and in 2016 wrote the Polkadot white paper — printed on polka-dot-colored sheets — proposing a new approach.
He settled on the name Polkadot because it’s a pattern with no beginning, end or center, feeding into the idea of decentralized applications.
Instead of operating apps through smart contracts — relatively small pieces of code running on the Ethereum blockchain — Polkadot allows each app developer to create their own blockchain that can talk to other ledgers.
Developers can decide what kind of transaction fees to charge and how fast to confirm blocks of transactions across the digital ledgers.
While development activity around Polkadot has been robust, other projects like Solana have gotten more attention recently.
And Ethereum — the crypto world’s biggest commercial highway — recently completed a major upgrade that could make its ecosystem cheaper and faster within months, rendering it more of a competitive threat.
Polkadot itself has overcome some adversity through the years.
While the project raised $140 million in an initial coin offering in 2017, a huge chunk of that money later became unaccessible due to a security vulnerability that a user exploited in a so-called Parity wallet that Wood helped create.
Polkadot ended up raising a private round of funding in 2019, and another $43 million in a private sale in 2020.
–With assistance from Muyao Shen and Suvashree Ghosh.
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