Gavin Wood
Gavin Wood is best known for being the Co-Founder of Ethereum. He is also the Founder and President of the Web3 Foundation, an initiative that advocates for a decentralized internet where users are in control of their data and identity. Additionally, Wood has helped establish or advised a number of organizations, including GridSingularity, Blockchain Capital, Polychain Capital, and Melonport. He has sat on panels, given seminars, and presented to numerous audiences around the globe—from keynotes at regional technology conferences to musings on the future of legal systems at prestigious law schools.
Gavin Wood Professional Experience / Academic History
Professional Experience
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Founder and Lead Developer
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Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer
Academic History
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PhD, Music Visualization for Human-Computer Interfacing
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MEng, Computer Systems and Software Engineering
- Wood has written the Polkadot paper, a proposal for a heterogeneous scalable multi-chain; the first of its kind.
- He came up with the terms "web three" and "allegality."
- He is behind the Milton Keynes board game, the Fractal Playground, and the Localised Proportional Representation voting system.
- He used to teach fractals and art to kids in a school in Italy.
- He speaks Italian, French, Spanish, Lojban, and Romanian.
- He is proficient in taekwondo and snowboarding.
- He has appeared as a guest on Real Vision.
BEFORE ETHEREUM
- Wood grew to love technology and game theory.
- His love for computers and technology was further fortified by his neighbor Sean who taught him to code his first computer program.
- He continued to develop his developer skills in the early 2000s with an extendable, yet scalable architecture of audio-signal refinement and fine-tuning with Exscalibar.
- After completing his doctorate, he worked on a next-generation cross-platform game engine for Frontier Developments.
- In 2007, he started Quid Pro Code, a software shop where he designed and implemented the first C++ language workbench, Martta.
- In 2011, as the Technical Director at the Lancaster Logic Response, he developed a system for creating real-time light-shows for music, which were deployed to one of London's top nightclubs.
- He also worked in the development of Noted, an extensible audio analysis and notation C++ environment.
- Wood first read about Bitcoin in 2011 and was largely uninterested.
- In 2013, he was building OxLegal when he met Vitalik Buterin through a mutual friend.
- He holed up with Buterin, Charles Hoskinson, Anthony Di Iorio, Wendell Davies, and others in a beach house in Miami in January 2014.
- There, he coded the first functional implementation of Ethereum, known as PoC-1 or the alpha release in late January 2014.
- He is credited with the invention of Solidity, the smart contract programming language used as the basis for Ethereum.
- He wrote the Yellow Paper, the first formal specification of any blockchain protocol.