Gavin Wood Returns as Polkadot's CEO, Credits Tighter Spending for Network's First Profit

Gavin Wood is a British computer scientist who co-authored the Ethereum Yellow Paper and founded Polkadot, a protocol that lets separate blockchains share security and communicate with each other.

Wood was born in April 1980 in Lancaster, England, and earned his Master of Engineering from the University of York in 2002 and his PhD in Computer Science in 2005. Before crypto, he worked as a research scientist and software consultant.

He joined Ethereum in 2013, working alongside Vitalik Buterin on the early vision for a programmable blockchain. As CTO, Wood turned that vision into a formal specification developers could build against, publishing the Ethereum Yellow Paper in 2014. The document defines the Ethereum Virtual Machine and the rules the network still runs on today.

Wood also wrote the first version of Solidity, the language most Ethereum smart contracts are written in, though Christian Reitwiessner and others expanded it into its current form. He left the Ethereum Foundation in 2016 after disagreements over how fast Ethereum should evolve and how flexible its architecture should be.