Gavin Wood is a British programmer and entrepreneur best known for his major contributions to the Ethereum project. He is one of four co-founders, along with Vitalik Buterin, Anthony Di Iorio, and Charles Hoskinson.
Wood served as Chief Technology Officer (CTO) from 2014 until 2016 when he left the organization to pursue other projects. In 2017 he founded Parity Technologies which develops software used by organizations that utilize blockchain technology primarily based on Ethereum protocol.
Wood graduated from Durham University in England in 2006 with a degree in Computer Science & Philosophy and soon after began working for Microsoft UK as a Program Manager. He went on to develop mobile apps at Kestrel Signal Processing before taking up freelance programming jobs around Europe while also pursuing interests such as writing music and traveling extensively.
In 2013 Wood was introduced to Bitcoin by Di Iorio who then asked him if he wanted to join their team developing an improved version of Bitcoin called Ethereum which would later become the most successful blockchain network ever created thus far. After much development work, Wood wrote the first Yellow Paper outlining how consensus should be achieved within proof-of-work blockchains using what became known as “the GHOST Protocol” (Greedy Heaviest Observed Subtree). This discovery enabled faster transactions across larger blockchains thereby making them more efficient than their predecessors such as Bitcoin Core Network or Litecoin Network among others at that time .
From early-on Gavin’s technical expertise helped create many of the core protocols underlying today’s cryptocurrency ecosystem including Whisper messaging system; Web3 Javascript API; Geth GoLang client; Swarm decentralized storage platform; and Polkadot interoperability protocol amongst many others contributing significantly towards transforming financial services industry via distributed ledger technologies (DLT).
