Gavin Wood

Gavin James Wood is an English computer scientist, a co-founder of Ethereum, and creator of Polkadot and Kusama. He coined the phrase Web 3.0 in 2014.

Career Before working on Ethereum, Wood was a research scientist at Microsoft. with Vitalik Buterin, Charles Hoskinson, Anthony Di Iorio, and Joseph Lubin during 2013–2014. Wood proposed and helped develop Solidity, a programming language for writing smart contracts. He also released the paper defining the Ethereum Virtual Machine, the runtime system for smart contracts in Ethereum, in 2014. He also served as the Ethereum Foundation's first chief technology officer. Wood left the Ethereum Foundation in January 2016.

Wood founded Parity Technologies (formerly Ethcore), which developed a client for the Ethereum network and creates software for companies using blockchain technology, with Jutta Steiner, who also previously worked at the Ethereum Foundation. In 2025, his main focus was on Polkadot, and was involved in a speaking tour on the technology.

Charity Amid 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine Wood donated $5.8 million in cryptocurrency to support Ukraine.

Publications Ethereum: A Secure Decentralised Generalised Transaction Ledger Polkadot: Vision for a Heterogenous Multi-Chain Framework