Gavin Wood


Gavin Wood is a British computer programmer who co-founded Ethereum. He invented Solidity and wrote the Yellow Paper specifying the Ethereum Virtual Machine, and served as the Ethereum Foundation's first chief technology officer. After leaving in 2016, he co-founded Parity Technologies, which develops core infrastructure for Ethereum, Bitcoin, Zcash and Polkadot, an interoperability protocol he also co-founded. He has also been credited for coming up with the concept of Web 3.0.

Career

Prior to developing Ethereum, Wood worked as a research scientist at Microsoft. He co-founded Ethereum, which he has described as "one computer for the entire planet," with Vitalik Buterin and others during 2013–2014. Wood wrote Ethereum's coding language, Solidity, and released the Yellow Paper defining the Ethereum Virtual Machine, the runtime system for Smart contracts in Ethereum, in 2014. He also served as the Ethereum Foundation's first chief technology officer. Wood left Ethereum in 2016.
Wood founded Parity Technologies, 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. The company released the Parity Ethereum software client, written in Rust, in early 2016. He serves as Parity's CWO, as of 2018.
Wood has been credited for the coining the concept of Web 3.0 in 2014. He founded the Web3 Foundation, a nonprofit organisation focusing on decentralised internet infrastructure and technology, starting with Polkadot network.