Wood's Polkadot Treasury Posts First Profit Under His Leadership
Gavin Wood is a British computer scientist behind the Ethereum Yellow Paper and Polkadot. Born in April 1980, he studied at the University of York before working as a research scientist and software consultant.
Wood joined the team building Ethereum in 2013 and published the Ethereum Yellow Paper in 2014, defining the rules the network still runs on today. He also wrote the first version of Solidity, a language for writing smart contracts on Ethereum.
After leaving the Ethereum Foundation in 2016 due to disagreements over the project's future, Wood founded Parity Technologies and built Polkadot, a protocol allowing separate blockchains to share security and communicate with each other.
In 2024, Wood introduced JAM, a global singleton permissionless object environment designed to process large parallel workloads without bottlenecks. He returned as CEO of Parity Technologies in August 2025 and credited his renewed leadership with the network's first profitable quarter since it began publishing finances in 2023.