Key Takeaways
- Wood will remain as majority shareholder in Parity Technologies and occupy the title of chief architect.
- Wood’s co-founder Björn Wagner, will become the new CEO.
- Polkadot co-founder to now focus on making Polkadot “more relevant to large swathes of the population.”
Gavin Wood is relinquishing his CEO title at Parity, the blockchain infrastructure firm behind the Polkadot ecosystem. Wood will, however, remain as a majority shareholder in Parity Technologies and occupy the title of chief architect, while his co-founder, Björn Wagner, will become the new CEO.
Wood, who co-founded Polkadot in 2015, explaining the reason behind stepping down, stated that he never desired the CEO role, and it was not a title where he saw himself finding “eternal happiness.” “Anyone who has worked with me knows where my heart lies. I’m a thinker, coder, designer, and architect. Like many such people, I work best asynchronously”, he said.
Wood further added “A good CEO needs to be available to others on a far more continuous basis. They need to enjoy representing the company, internally as well as externally. They need not to be bothered by large swathes of their time becoming eaten up in calls,meetings with a plethora of multicolored boxes on their calendar”.
In his new position as Chief Architect, Wood will work on making Polkadot “more relevant to large swathes of the population.” He will work on promoting the mass adoption of Web3 technology by helping the community design and also build several chain-integrated social primitives.
“This will begin by helping the community design and build several interesting chain-integrated social primitives, which I think are crucial for us to deliver a true Web3 platform”, he said
Parity, formerly known as EthCore, was founded in late 2015 by Wood, Aeron Buchanan, Ken Kappler, TJ Saw, and Jutta Steiner. The company released the Parity Ethereum software client, written in Rust, in early 2016. Wood held the title of chief web officer at Parity in 2018.
The Polkadot protocol was adapted by Ethereum co-founder Gavin Wood and was developed by the Web3 Foundation with the initial implementation by Parity Technologies. The protocol focused on improving blockchain scaling and raised over $144.3 million in its Initial coin offering in October 2017.
It has now emerged as a major smart contract competitor to Ethereum. Wood is also a former member of the Ethereum Team and was also the first developer to get an Ethereum testnet up and running.
