Wood is considered the architect of the Polkadot blockchain, one of a small number of successful Ethereum competitors that have popped up in the last few years. Its native token, DOT, is currently ranked as the 11th most valuable cryptocurrency in the world.
Before becoming a rival to Ethereum, Wood helped get it off the ground. He was a key contributor to Ethereum, giving the network much-needed technical help when it was just starting out.
Gavin is credited with getting Ethereum's first testnet up and running, writing the Ethereum Yellow Paper, which was a technical expansion of Vitalik Buterin's original whitepaper, and coming up with the idea for Solidity, Ethereum's native programming language. He also served as the chief technology officer for the Ethereum Foundation.
He is 1 of the 8 official co-founders, but only Vitalik Buterin is still part of Ethereum today.
But Wood Isn't Going Anywhere...
Yes, he will still work at Parity. He just demoted himself, at least on the corporate ladder.
Unlike most CEOs, he still codes, and thinks about how things work on the back end. But the CEO of a busy company won't have enough time after CEO duties to also be a developer, at least not one who makes significant contributions.
So, Bjorn Wagner, who also co-founded Parity will now be CEO, and Gavin Wood takes the title of Chief Architect.
While it is common for 'CEO stepping down' announcements to contain bad news, or vaguely worded explanations meant to downplay the bad news - Wood actually explained what is happening perfectly, it sounds honest, and there's no bad news involved "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; a great day is taking 10 hours straight to think out some problem, prototype something or collapse some disparate thoughts into an article. The role of CEO has never been one which I have coveted (and this dates back long before Parity). I can act at being a CEO well enough for a short while, but it’s not where I’m going to find eternal happiness."
Fair enough, and in my opinion sounds like the right move for the company as a whole, with some potential for this to actually be a big plus for Polkadot.
Big Changes coming to Polkadot?
I can't help but wonder if the timing for all this is random, or, what I feel is the more likely reason - that Parity is working on something exciting enough for Gavin to go all-in on building it.
While I'm not bullish on anything yet (crypto, stocks, gold, silver - none of it), DOT was already on my list of coins with strong long-term potential, but after today's news considering starting to including it among my 'closest followed' projects.
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