Today we will talk about the outstanding British programmer-enthusiast Dr. Gavin Wood. He has made a significant contribution to the development of the crypto industry thanks to his competent efforts in the field of implementing smart contracts on the Ethereum platform. It was his ability to translate ideas into reality that contributed to the emergence and success of many wonderful projects in the field of cryptography.

Hobbies

Gavin Wood, born London in 1980. He showed himself from childhood as a diligent and inquisitive child who strived to learn the exact sciences. A passion for computers and games caught his attention. When describing Gavin, his friends spoke of his quick wit and persistence in bringing his own ideas to life.

As he grew older, his childhood hobbies turned into creating his own online games, among which the famous “Milton Kaynes” stands out. Gavin began his education at the Royal Lancaster School, and after graduating he entered York University in Toronto to major in computer engineering. At the age of 22, he received a master's degree, and three years later he successfully defended his thesis, receiving a doctorate in engineering.

After this, Gavin began teaching and, having found new hobbies in snowboarding, studying Italian, French, and even Romanian, continued to explore various programming languages. His interests also included photography and taekwondo.

Ethereum

After 2013, an experienced programmer from the UK, who already had 15 years of experience working with open source code, became one of the participants in a crypto conference, where he met Vitalik Buterin.

He sought to use Wood's programming skills to take Ethereum from an idea written down on paper into a fully functional blockchain. Their collaboration bore fruit, and Wood soon joined Buterin in Miami, where they began creating PoC-1 Ethereum. They presented the results of their work at the North American Bitcoin Conference in January 2014. At that moment, Gavin described Ethereum as “a super-powerful computer for the whole world” and devoted all his free time to the development of the project.

Six months later, the guys came to Switzerland to officially announce the founding #Ethereum. Buterin explained the choice of this country due to its freedom-loving legislation regarding cryptocurrencies and the presence of many potential investors.

When Wood began working on Ethereum, he initially doubted whether the project would bring him any profit. However, he became one of the co-founders and technical director of the project.

Hacking

Everything was fine, the project was developing successfully, the team was considered one of the best in the industry, until in 2016 the DAO (Decentralized Autonomous Organization) fund appeared on the Ethereum network. The founder of this organization combined the best principles of crowdfunding, hedge funds and decentralized governance from many investors, creating something revolutionary in the world of cryptocurrencies.

The essence of the DAO concept is to have a closed network that can govern itself. The DAO fund has become wildly successful. In less than a month, a team of developers from Slock.it and Ethereum managed to raise more than $150 million.

Users, noticing that the platform's source code is on GitHub, began to talk about its vulnerability. Initially, the developers did not pay much attention to this, making a significant mistake. On June 17, 2016, one of the largest crypto hacks in history occurred. The attackers found a vulnerability and were able to withdraw about a third of all funds stored in DAO accounts, which amounted to approximately $50 million in Ethereum cryptocurrency. This caused panic in the community.

After the DAO incident, the price of Ethereum fell sharply, by almost half its value. During a subsequent interview, Gavin Wood gave his opinion on this event, trying to explain that the problem was not related to Ethereum itself, but rather to one of its applications, and that smart contracts are not an integral part of Ethereum.

Gavin, as technical director, tried to convey to Vitalik and the team that it was necessary to change the system, since if they continued to follow the same course, then eventually scalability would lead to colossal gas prices and vulnerabilities. But this would require redoing more than 50% of all the work done. No one could agree to this. And Wood left Ethereum to found his own project.

Polkadot

In one of his white papers written in 2016 for the #Polkadot project, he named his network with an inspired name that translates to Polka Dot Pattern, reflecting the idea of ​​infinity and continuity. Unlike Ethereum's Proof of Work mechanism, Polkadot is based on the Proof of Stake mechanism and allows developers to create their own blockchains. The developers themselves determine the size of transaction fees and the speed of confirmation of blocks in the network. This innovative idea requires significant resources to implement it. In 2017, Polkadot was able to raise $140 million in an ICO, but unfortunately, history repeated itself and the project faced problems similar to those that happened with the DAO. Now Polkadot is thriving, and the project’s coin is among the top 15 cryptocurrencies in the world. After leaving the airwaves, Gavin built exactly the project he wanted. And Ethereum, in the end, after 8 years, still switched to Proof of Stake, realizing the ineffectiveness of other solutions that Gavin warned about many years ago.

Polkadot was followed by other innovative projects, including Substrate.

Bottom line

After a year of actively working on the Polkadot project, Gavin finally announced a fundamental breakthrough on May 17, 2021. The Kusama Canary Network was ready to launch parachains - forked chains that allow different blockchains to be deployed on the Polkadot platform with unique logic while maintaining overall security. This event served as a crucial final test before launching a similar update on Polkadot itself.

Ethereum currently ranks second in market capitalization among cryptocurrencies, Polkadot is in the top 10 projects, and Kusama is ranked in the top 50. Dr. Gavin Wood has put a huge amount of effort and time into the development of all these projects, becoming a dedicated advocate for his work with long-term ideas that may seem incomprehensible to many and probably ahead of the times and even market developments.

In October 2022, Gavin Wood announced his resignation as CEO of Parity Technologies Ltd, but remained a shareholder and chief architect of Parity.

Now he acts as a consultant for the founders of new crypto projects, conducts lectures for developers and continues to live by work, although not as actively as a few years ago. But maybe we don’t know something, and perhaps we will see in the media the name of this brilliant developer, who brought so many unique solutions to the world of blockchain and cryptography.

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