Gavin Wood, CEO of Parity Technologies, the company behind the Polkadot blockchain, is stepping down from his position in the company.
The motivation to change the company’s main leading position came from a desire from Wood himself. In a statement released on October 21st, acting as Parity’s CEO has never been what the Ethereum co-founder desired for his career.
Wood later stated how working as a CEO would hinder his own pursuit of “eternal happiness”, meaning that this transition comes from Wood’s personal motives, not from Parity’s decision to change its leadership.
“A good CEO needs to be available to others on a far more continuous basis.” Wood wrote in Parity’s official statement. “They need to enjoy representing the company, both internally and externally. They need to not be bothered by large swathes of their time becoming eaten up in meetings and calls with a plethora of multicolored boxes on their calendar.”
Despite the drastic transition in the leadership, Wood will remain an important head of the company.
The now-former CEO will remain as the company’s chief architect and the majority shareholder of Parity’s assets.
Wood states that this change will allow him to focus on what he enjoys doing, and by that, he feels he can deliver more valuable accomplishments to Parity’s main goal.
Furthermore, Gavin states that he plans to explore more possibilities in regard to making Polkadot and Web3 “more relevant to large swathes of the population.”
“his will begin by helping the community design and build several interesting chain-integrated social primitives which I think are crucial for us to deliver a true Web3 platform.”
Who Is Gavin Wood?
Wood, a British programmer with a Ph.D. in musical visualization, joined the Ethereum development team one month after cofounder Vitalik Buterin published his white paper.
As Ethereum’s first technology director, Wood was instrumental in the creation of assets that made the network appealing to developers.
However, he felt that the Ethereum design was, in its final analysis, limited. In 2016, he wrote the Polkadot white paper which proposed a new approach for blockchains.
He chose the name Polkadot because it is a pattern with a beginning, middle, and end, feeding the idea of decentralized applications.
Instead of operating apps using smart contracts – small pieces of code that are executed on the Ethereum blockchain – Polkadot allows any app developer to create their own blockchain that can communicate with other networks.
In Polkadot, developers can choose which kind of transaction fees to charge and how quickly to approve transaction blocks in digital books.
