Parity

Gavin Wood

Co-founder

About

Gavin Wood is a British computer scientist and software engineer, best known as co-founder of Ethereum, inventor of the Solidity programming language, and creator of Polkadot and Kusama.

He studied at the University of York, earning a Master of Engineering in 2002 and a PhD in Computer Science in 2005. Before blockchain, Wood worked across software industries, including as a Research and Software Consultant at Microsoft Research Cambridge.

Introduced to Vitalik Buterin in 2013, he helped turn the Ethereum whitepaper into reality, co-founding the Ethereum Foundation and serving as its first CTO until 2015. After leaving Ethereum, he founded Parity Technologies and the Web3 Foundation, where he leads the development of Polkadot and Kusama.

His ambition is to advance Web 3.0, a decentralized internet, through technologies such as parachains, sharding, and on-chain governance.

Speaking at

Events

01 DARK Prague Prague, CZ Oct 2–4, 2026 #DPRG 02 DARK Prague Prague, Czech Republic Oct 3–5, 2025 #DPRG

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