10 Facts About Gavin Wood

Gavin James Wood is an English computer scientist, a co-founder of Ethereum, and creator of Polkadot and Kusama.

Gavin Wood graduated from the University of York with a Master of Engineering in Computer Systems and Software Engineering in 2002 and completed his PhD entitled "Content-based visualization to aid common navigation of musical audio" in 2005.

Gavin Wood proposed and helped develop Solidity, a programming language for writing smart contracts.

Gavin Wood released the paper defining the Ethereum Virtual Machine, the runtime system for smart contracts in Ethereum, in 2014.

Gavin Wood served as the Ethereum Foundation's first chief technology officer.

Gavin Wood founded Parity Technologies, which developed a client for the Ethereum network and creates software for companies using blockchain technology, with Jutta Steiner, who previously worked at the Ethereum Foundation.

Gavin Wood released the Parity Ethereum software client, written in Rust, in early 2016.

Gavin Wood held the title of chief web officer at Parity in 2018.

Gavin Wood founded the Web3 Foundation, a nonprofit organization focusing on decentralized internet infrastructure and technology, starting with the Polkadot network.

Amid 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine Gavin Wood donated $5.8 million in cryptocurrency to support Ukraine.