When students of Polkadot’s Blockchain Academy finished their five-week-long developers’ boot camp in Hong Kong earlier this year, it was time to party.
Gathering for the graduation ceremony, the DeFi network’s rank and file watched a familiar face take position behind the DJ rig — Gavin Wood, Polkadot’s co-founder and one of the brains behind Ethereum.
First up: a track by French musician NTO. Daft Punk and Franz Ferdinand songs came next.
Welcome to Gavin Wood’s next act.
After a decade of playing a key role in building the DeFi ecosystem, Wood, 44, is picking up on his original passion — music.
“If you see anything published with DJ Wasabi, that’s me,” Wood told DL News.
Looking for a groove
His move comes as Polkadot, a so-called blockchain of blockchains network, has struggled to find a groove.
In 2023, Parity Technologies, the company building the Polkadot network, cut nearly a third of its 385-strong staff because it was running out of money, according to employees.
Polkadot used to be a top 10 crypto venture in terms of token value. This year, it’s DOT token has tumbled 50% even as ETH has increased 5% and archrival Cardano has tumbled 45%.
In July, Polkadot took more heat when critics blasted its decision to spend $87 million in the first six months of the year.
Almost half of that was spent on marketing initiatives, which included $400,000 to make an animated version of the Polkadot logo on the crypto site CoinMarketCap.
“It’s insane to me how much money the Polkadot treasury is wasting on misplaced marketing,” Seun Lanlege, former core developer at Parity, said on X.
With Wood turning to DJing, many in DeFi may wonder whether he’s disengaging from his day job.
Wood dismissed such concerns and downplayed his role at the project, even though he is Parity’s chief architect.
“I’m much lower down in the stack,” he said.
‘I’m a scientist’
During the Web3 Summit in August, Wood spoke to DL News at Berlin’s Funkhaus, a former East German radio centre, now a studio and concert venue.
It was a fitting place to talk as the Lancaster, England native shared how he approaches blockchain design and technology.
“I want to run experiments. I’m a researcher, I’m a scientist, I’m an academic,” he said. “Curiosity is my main driving factor here.”
‘The biggest thing for Polkadot was that Ethereum, to some degree, had stalled.’
Indeed, Wood has a knack for pursuing unusual ventures. He’s preparing to roll out an “individuality” system later this year to tattoo people with machine-generated designs that look like QR codes.
Wood’s career started with a mashup of computer science and music.
In 2005, Wood completed a five-year PhD program at the University of York, where he researched how computers listen to music. He also created a visual representation of what the machine heard.
His thesis shows what Dave Brubeck’s classic jazz number Take Five would look like according to a computer.
Wood dallied in tech projects, too.
He worked as a researcher for Microsoft and taught geometry in a Catholic school in Italy. He sold lighting systems to nightclubs and bars in London, and then tried to launch a Microsoft Word plug-in to automate the tedious work of lawyers.
Before long, he met Vitalik Buterin, Jeffrey Wilcke, and Charles Hoskinson, who were developing Ethereum. For Wood, Ethereum was essentially a weekend project he pursued while building that Word plug-in in the early 2010s.
Inventing Ethereum
He wrote one of the first Ethereum clients — a software application that lets developers interact with the blockchain — in the programming language C++. Wood helped invent Ethereum’s programming language, Solidity, and co-authored the Yellow Paper, the first formal explainer of what the network was meant to do and how.
“I also bring a lot more design and engineering, I would say, like an almost artistic kind of nature,” he told DL News.
Even though Wood cemented his place in crypto by co-creating a blockchain system that became the cornerstone of decentralised finance, he complains that Ethereum lacks dynamism.
“The Ethereum protocol has essentially remained unchanged compared to the vision that Vitalik and I had back 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 create a more efficient and affordable network to support dApps and smart contracts.
“The biggest thing for Polkadot was that Ethereum, to some degree, had stalled,” he said. ”I wanted to build.”
The project raised $144 million in 2017 via an initial coin offering — a crypto crowdfund where people invest real money in exchange for the network’s native tokens. It began officially producing blocks in 2020.
During the 2021 boom, its total value vaulted to $54 billion, and DOT became a top 10 cryptocurrency.
Clunky bridges
He also launched the blockchain to address key bottlenecks facing Ethereum.
Layer 2 blockchains — mini blockchains that aggregate transactions into low-cost proofs before sending them to Ethereum — are now commonplace on Ethereum.
Polkadot introduced a similar design, called parachains, from day one.
Any project that chooses to build on Polkadot and launch their own parachain can easily interact with other Polkadot-based projects.
For Ethereum-based layer 2 networks, users must interact with clunky bridges to move funds between networks.
Wood said Polkadot more closely resembles the early vision for Ethereum.
“Way back when it was all fields, layer 2s were never the dream,” he said. “The dream that Ethereum core developers were pushing five years ago was something that looks a bit like Polkadot.”
A strange cull
In April, he built out this vision further with a Polkadot upgrade called JAM, an acronym for Join-Accumalate Machine. Instead of builders auctioning for a parachain, JAM will let anyone build one.
The upgrade isn’t just technical. It comes at a time when Polkadot is trying to revive the interest it enjoyed in 2021.
It hasn’t been easy to buck the long funk that’s bedevilled DeFi.
Not only did Parity need to cut a great deal of staff due to top-heavy executive salaries, but the cull was handled awkwardly, employees said.
The company announced layoffs a week before a company retreat to Mallorca without detailing exactly who would be leaving.
One Parity employee at the time called it “a surreal, sick joke.” Wood didn’t attend the beach retreat, which left many angry and confused.
Now Wood may be raising eyebrows again with his next project, which he calls “proof-of-ink.”
At Web3 Summit, Wood explained how the Polkadot blockchain could generate unique tattoo designs. The designs would prove a person is who they say they are online without revealing other information. In crypto, so-called Sybil attacks — where one user creates multiple identities — are a common problem.
Wood showed his own QR-like code on his bicep. He’s working on other designs before the launch at the end of 2024.
‘I would really hate for it to be spread that this is some sort of tattoo identification system.’
The practice of tattooing identification on people’s skin might spark a strong reaction from people, especially in a place like Germany. Wood bristles at the implication.
“I spent a very long time emphasising that this is not about identification,” he told DL News. “This is about individuality. I spent a very long time emphasising privacy and that this is using strong crypto to guarantee privacy.”
“I would really hate for it to be spread that this is some sort of tattoo identification system, because that would be total misinformation.”
The project shows how Wood follows his instincts no matter where they lead, be it crypto-related tattoos or spinning up music as DJ Wasabi.
”To me, it’s not really worthwhile doing unless it’s novel,” he said. “I’m an experimenter.”
Liam Kelly is a DeFi Correspondent for DL News. Got a tip? Email him at liam@dlnews.com.
