Gavin Wood | |
|---|---|
 Wood inTechCrunch Disrupt Event inBerlin 2017 | |
| Born | Gavin James Wood Lancaster, England |
| Education | Lancaster Royal Grammar School |
| Alma mater | University of York |
| Known for | Co-founder ofEthereum and former CTO of the Ethereum Foundation; co-founder ofPolkadot; CWO and Chairman of Parity Technologies; author of the PolkadotWhite Paper and the Ethereum Yellow Paper |
| Scientific career | |
| Thesis | Content-based visualisation to aid common navigation of musical audio (2005) |
| Website | gavwood |
Gavin James Wood is an English computer scientist, a co-founder ofEthereum, and creator ofPolkadot and Kusama.[1][2]
Wood was born inLancaster, England, United Kingdom. He attended theLancaster Royal Grammar School. He graduated from theUniversity of York with aMaster of Engineering (MEng) in Computer Systems and Software Engineering in 2002 and completed his PhD entitled "Content-based visualization to aid common navigation of musical audio" in 2005.[3]
Before working onEthereum, Wood was a research scientist atMicrosoft.[1] He was one of the founders of the Ethereum blockchain, which he has described as "one computer for the entire planet,"[4] withVitalik Buterin,Charles Hoskinson,Anthony Di Iorio, andJoseph Lubin during 2013–2014.[5][6] Wood proposed and helped developSolidity,[7] a programming language for writing smart contracts. He also released the paper defining the Ethereum Virtual Machine,[8] theruntime system forsmart contracts in Ethereum, in 2014. He also served as the Ethereum Foundation's firstchief technology officer.[9][10][11] Wood left the Ethereum Foundation in January 2016.[12]
Wood founded Parity Technologies (formerly Ethcore), which developed a client for the Ethereum network and creates software for companies using blockchain technology, with Jutta Steiner, who also previously worked at the Ethereum Foundation.[1][10] The company released the Parity Ethereum softwareclient, written inRust, in early 2016. He held the title of chief web officer at Parity in 2018.
He founded the Web3 Foundation, a nonprofit organisation focusing on decentralised internet infrastructure and technology, starting with thePolkadot network.[10]
Amid2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine Wood donated $5.8 million in cryptocurrency to supportUkraine.[13]
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