Gavin Woods, co-founder of Polkadot resigns as CEO of Parity Technologies. Björn Wagner will now helm the company in his stead.
Co-founder of Polkadot Gavin Wood is resigning from his position as CEO of blockchain infrastructure provider Parity Technologies. Wood admitted that he had no interest in becoming CEO in a statement made public on October 21. Although he could do so in the short term, he did not see himself in that role as one where he would have “eternal happiness”.
Wood shared: “Anyone who has worked with me knowS where my heart lies. I’m a thinker, coder, designer, and architect. Like many such people, work best asynchronously.” He added:
“A good CEO needs to be available to others on a far more continuous basis. They need to enjoy representing the company, both internally and externally. They need to not be bothered by large swathes of their time becoming eaten up in meetings and calls with a plethora of multi-colored boxes on their calendar.”
Gavin Woods Joins List of Crypto Execs Exiting
Wood said in his statement that Björn Wagner, another Parity co-founder, would take over as the company’s CEO. Wood also said that he would continue to maintain the majority of the company’s stock and assume the role of chief architect.
Following a recent wave of well-known exits, Wood is the most recent crypto executive to go. Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, co-founders of the Gemini Exchange, left their roles on the board of directors of Gemini Europe, according to a Gemini Europe filing dated last week.
Jesse Powell, the previous CEO of the cryptocurrency exchange Kraken, left his position on September 21, 2022. In addition, on September 27, 2022, Alex Mashinsky, the previous CEO of Celsius Network, announced his resignation.
Gavin’s Impact on Ethereum Blockchain
The British programmer Wood is best known for creating Ethereum and serving as its chief technology officer. Wood originally contacted Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin to offer his C++ coding expertise in order to aid in the creation of Ethereum. Buterin claims that Wood also contributed to the development of Ethereum’s vision. Many of the modifications Wood made began as minor variations in vocabulary and emphasis.
Ethereum changed under Wood from being a blockchain platform for smart contracts and programmable currency to a multifunctional “global computer.” In 2014, Wood put out the Solidity programming language, which is utilized for smart contracts.
Following his work on Ethereum, Wood began developing a fresh concept that ultimately led to the creation of the heterogeneous multi-chain platform Polkadot. In 2016, while waiting for work to start on creating the sharding specifications for ETH 2.0, Wood created a simple sharded Ethereum. An ETH 2.0 shard has a similar architecture to Polkadots parachain. In October 2016, he finished a whitepaper that would later become known as the Polkadot Whitepaper.
Parity Technologies later developed the Substrate framework, a skeleton blockchain to build a new blockchain, and Polkadot.
