When Polkadot students finished up their five-week developer bootcamp in Hong Kong earlier this year, the party was on. During the graduation ceremony, members of the DeFi network saw a familiar face taking their place behind the DJ booth — Gavin Wood, co-founder of Polkadot and one of the masterminds of Ethereum.
After playing a key role in building the DeFi ecosystem for a decade, Gavin Wood, 44, is returning to his original passion: music. “If you see any articles about DJ Wasabi, that’s me,” Wood told DL News.
Finding new directions
The backdrop of his move is that Polkadot has been struggling to find a breakthrough.
Parity Technologies, the company building the Polkadot network, laid off nearly a third of its 385 employees in 2023 due to a lack of funds, according to employees. Polkadot was once one of the top 10 cryptocurrency projects by token value. This year, its DOT token has fallen 50%, while ETH has risen 5% and rival Cardano has fallen 45%.
In July, Polkadot faced more criticism, with critics slamming its decision to spend $87 million in the first half of the year. Nearly half of that was spent on marketing, including $400,000 to create an animated Polkadot logo on cryptocurrency website CoinMarketCap.
“It’s crazy that the Polkadot treasury wasted so much money on misguided marketing,” said Seun Lanlege, a former core developer at Parity, on X.
A Parity representative said that marketing expenses stem from the project’s governance system. “Spending on marketing initiatives is a direct result of on-chain treasury spending as voted on by the community,” the representative told DL News.
With Wood’s transition to DJing, many in DeFi may wonder if he’s out of touch with his day job. Although Wood is Parity’s lead designer, he denies such concerns and downplays his role in the project. “My position is much more junior,” he said.
“I am a scientist.”
During the Web3 Summit in August, Wood spoke to DL News at Funkhaus in Berlin. Here, Wood shared his views on blockchain design and technology. "I want to experiment. I'm a researcher, a scientist, an academic, and curiosity is my main driving force here," he said. "The biggest problem for Polkadot is that Ethereum has stagnated to some extent."
In fact, Wood is so good at pursuing unusual adventures that he plans to launch a "personalization" system later this year that will tattoo people with machine-generated QR code-like patterns.
Wood’s career began at the fusion of computer science and music.
In 2005, Wood completed a five-year doctoral program at York University, studying how computers hear music. He also created visual illustrations of the music that machines hear. His thesis showed what Dave Brubeck's jazz classic "Take Five" would sound like to a computer.
Wood has also worked on tech projects. He worked as a Microsoft researcher and taught geometry at a Catholic school in Italy. He sold lighting systems to nightclubs and bars in London, then tried to launch a Microsoft Word plug-in to automate the tedious tasks of lawyers.
Soon after, he met Vitalik Buterin, Jeffrey Wilcke, and Charles Hoskinson, who were developing Ethereum. For Wood, Ethereum was essentially a weekend project he had been working on while developing a Word plugin in the early 2010s.
Co-invented Ethereum
He wrote one of the first Ethereum clients, a software application that allows developers to interact with the blockchain, in the C++ programming language. Wood helped invent Ethereum's programming language, Solidity, and co-authored the Ethereum Yellow Paper, the first document to formally describe the purpose and operation of the Ethereum network.
“I also bring more of a design and engineering side to the table, which is like an almost artistic nature, I would say,” he told DL News.
Although Wood has cemented his place in the cryptocurrency space by co-founding a blockchain system that has become the cornerstone of decentralized finance, he feels Ethereum lacks dynamism. “The Ethereum protocol has remained largely unchanged from the vision that Vitalik and I laid out in 2014,” he said.
In 2016, Wood struck out on his own and co-founded Polkadot with Robert Habermeier and Peter Czaban. The idea was to build a more efficient and affordable network to support dApps and smart contracts. "The biggest problem for Polkadot is that Ethereum has stagnated to some extent," he said. "I want to continue to develop."
The project raised $144 million in an initial coin offering in 2017 — a type of cryptocurrency crowdfunding where people put in real money in exchange for the network’s native token. It began producing blocks in 2020. In the 2021 boom, its total value jumped to $54 billion, making DOT a top 10 cryptocurrency.
Improving the “cumbersome” cross-chain
He also launched a blockchain to address a key bottleneck facing Ethereum. That is, layer 2 blockchains (mini blockchains that aggregate transactions into low-cost proofs that are then transmitted to Ethereum) are now common on Ethereum.
Polkadot introduced a similar design from day one, called parachains. Any project that chooses to build on Polkadot and launch its own parachain can easily interact with other Polkadot-based projects. For Ethereum-based layer 2 networks, users must interact with cumbersome cross-chain bridges to transfer funds between networks.
Wood said Polkadot is closer to Ethereum’s early vision. “Back when all the fields were still blank, the second layer network was no longer a dream. The dream that Ethereum core developers pushed five years ago looks a bit like Polkadot.”
“I’m an experimenter.”
In April, he built on that vision with a Polkadot upgrade called JAM, or Join-Accumalate Machine. JAM will allow anyone to build a parachain, rather than having builders auction off a parachain. The upgrade isn’t just technical. It comes as Polkadot tries to recapture the glory days of 2021. But escaping the woes that have plagued DeFi for so long won’t be easy.
Employees said that Parity not only needed to lay off a large number of employees due to excessive executive compensation, but also handled the layoffs awkwardly. The company announced the layoffs a week before going to Mallorca, but did not disclose the specific layoffs. One Parity employee called it "a surreal, bad joke."
Wood’s absence from the beach vacation has angered and confused many. In July, Parity completed a restructuring and is currently hiring new employees. A Parity representative said its job board lists 11 open positions.
Now, Wood’s next project may attract attention again, which he calls “proof-of-ink.” At the Web3 Summit, Wood explained how the Polkadot blockchain can generate unique tattoo patterns.
The patterns can prove that a person is who they say they are online without revealing other information. It seems to address so-called Sybil attacks, where a user creates multiple identities, a common problem in cryptocurrencies.
Wood shows off a QR code on his bicep. He is working on other designs before the launch in late 2024. “I really don’t want this to be seen as some kind of tattoo identification system.” Tattooing identity markers on panels could provoke a backlash, especially in a place like Germany. Wood bristles at the suggestion.
“I spent a lot of time emphasizing that this is not about identification,” he told DL News. “This is about individuality. I spent a lot of time emphasizing privacy, and this is protected by strong encryption. I really don’t want people to say this is a tattoo recognition system, because that’s completely misleading.”
The project shows how Wood always follows his instincts, no matter where it leads him, from getting crypto-related tattoos to performing music as DJ Wasabi. “For me, unless it’s novel, it’s not worth doing,” he said. “I’m an experimenter.”
