Gavin Wood, co-founder of Parity Technologies, the company behind the Polkadotblockchainblockchain, is stepping down as the firm’s CEO, according to a Bloomberg report.
Wood, also an early EthereumEthereum contributor and co-founder, will remain Parity’s majority shareholder and chief architect. Parity co-founder Björn Wagner will assume the title of CEO. The move is reportedly of Wood’s own volition, due to his feeling that serving as chief executive has limited his ability to pursue “eternal happiness.”
Polkadot—widely considered to have been masterminded by Wood—is a so-called multichain network that allows its developers to each build upon their own blockchain, and connects those myriad, smaller networks together as “parachains.”
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The intensively decentralized nature of the network has made it an attractive alternative to Ethereum since its creation in 2020; the network’s native token, DOT, is the 11th largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization, according to CoinGecko. It is currently valued at $6.8 billion.
Before creating a major Ethereum competitor, though, Wood was a key contributor to Ethereum itself, who offered the network much-needed technical expertise in its infancy.
Wood joined the Ethereum team in early 2014, just before the network’s unveiling; he was the first developer to get an Ethereum testnet up and running, and published the Ethereum Yellow Paper, a technical elaboration of Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin’s initial whitepaperwhitepaper. He proposed Ethereum’s native programming language, Solidity, and later served as the Ethereum Foundation’s chief technology officer.
At a fateful meeting in Zug, Switzerland, on June 7, 2014, Ethereum’s eight cofounders gathered together in a rented house in the woods, dubbed “the spaceship,” to decide the future of what was to become the world’s second-biggest blockchain platform.
They never did sign the document incorporating Ethereum, which is what had brought them there in the first place—the blockchain platform remains a non-profit. Instead, two stepped down from their active roles. But, from that point on, all eight w...
The British computer programmer eventually became disillusioned with centralized aspects of Ethereum’s functioning, and founded Polkadot largely as a corrective to those issues. The project has since amassed substantial popularity, particularly in China.
Off the news of Wood’s transition, DOT’s price did not fluctuate severely, but is down 4.2% in the last 24 hours to $5.83 at writing.
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Many in the Polkadot community appeared largely unaffected by Friday’s news, given Wood’s continued commitment to building and expanding the network.
Gavin Wood is one of the few founders who still writes code after the huge success of the network launch. Parity has hundreds of excellent developers. These are why I am bullish on Polkadot. Speaking of which role Gavin has, it doesn’t matter at all. #Polkadot
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