Gavin Wood: Blockchain and Decentralized Web Pioneer

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As a naturally curious child, 9-year-old Gavin was thrilled when his mother took it upon herself to get him an old neighbor's computer. What she probably didn't know, though, was that this old thing would pique his curiosity and make him a pioneer in building the Ethereum, Solidity, and Web3 foundations that would lay the groundwork for a new era of the Internet. In 2014, his curiosity brought him to Miami, where he co-founded Ethereum, a decentralized smart contract platform, with Vitalik Buterin and six others.

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Before Ethereum

Dr. Wood continued to build on his developer experience in the early 2000s, using a scalable and extensible audio signal refinement and Exscalibar fine-tuning architecture. After completing his Ph.D., he developed a next-generation cross-platform game engine for Frontier Developments. In 2007, he founded Quid Pro Code, a software shop, where he designed and implemented Martta, the first C++ language workbench, and he consulted for Microsoft Research on the technical side of embedded domain-specific languages. In 2011, as technical director at Lancaster Logic Response, he used his PhD to develop a system for creating a real-time light show to music, which he deployed to a top London nightclub. At LLR, Dr. Wood was also involved in the development of Noted, an extensible audio analysis and symbolic C++ environment.

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Ethereum era

Dr. Wood was building OxLegal in 2013 when he met Vitalik Buterin through a mutual friend and began working on a project outside the scope of his PhD research topic. With the help of Buterin, he started to make a decentralized platform that is very similar to the existing cryptocurrency Bitcoin, but very different in the vision and pursuit of Internet decentralization. In January 2014, Gavin was nestled at a Miami beach house with Buterin, Charles Hoskinson, Anthony Di Iorio, Wendell Davies and others. There, he wrote the first functional implementation of Ethereum, known as PoC-1 or alpha version). The five of them will present PoC-1 at the North American Bitcoin Conference in Miami in January 2014. Dr. Wood became a co-founder and CTO and authored the Ethereum Yellow Paper, which proposed the Ethereum Virtual Machine specification, the first formal specification for writing a blockchain state machine.

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Ethereum to Parity

Two years after founding Ethereum, Dr. Wood moved on with Ethereum alumni Dr. Jutta Steiner (Head of Security Audit), Dr. Aeron Buchanan (Head of Finance and Operations), and Ken Kappler (Head of Communications). At Parity, he conceived of many projects to innovate the current decentralized application environment, from Parity Ethereum, the fastest and most advanced Ethereum client, to DIY blockchain frameworks such as Substrate, a flexible technology stack , allowing users to build their own blockchain from scratch.

Dr. Wood, along with Ewald Hesse, Dr. Ana Trbovich and three other blockchain pioneers, co-founded Grid Singularity, an open Internet decentralized energy data exchange platform based on blockchain technology, continuing his decentralized Internet vision. In 2016, he was also involved in decentralized asset management on multiple blockchains with MelonPort AG.

Dr. Wood founded the Web3 Foundation to foster technologies and applications in the field of decentralized Web software protocols, and to stabilize the Web 3 ecosystem by applying modern encryption methods in decentralized networks.

The Web3 Foundation supports research into the Whisper protocol, conceived by Dr. Wood in 2014, which promises to enable confidential distributed messaging in the future of Web 3.0.

The Web3 Foundation launched Kusama, a "canary network" that allows developers to explore the finer complexities of Polkadot in a real-economy environment before launching their technology on mainnet. The launch of Kusama proved to be a valuable turning point in the launch of the Polkadot Network, the sharded multi-chain interoperability network Dr. Wood co-founded after leaving Ethereum.

Original: https://www.parity.io/about/gavin-wood/

Translation: PolkaWorld