Recently, I’ve been reading stories about the early development of blockchain, and I’ve noticed that many people know V God and Satoshi Nakamoto, but very few are familiar with the name Gavin Wood. In fact, within the developer community, his status is in no way inferior to those two.

Let’s start with Gavin Wood’s background. This guy was born in the UK in 1980. Starting at age 9, when his mom gave him an old computer, he’s been tinkering with code ever since. Later, he attended the University of York, earning both a master’s and a Ph.D. in computer science, with a focus on human-computer interaction and music visualization. After graduating, he worked on a number of things—providing technical consulting for Microsoft, designing intelligent lighting systems for London nightclubs, and developing various kinds of software. You can tell he has a kind of obsessive passion for creating new things. He has said himself that if he doesn’t write code for more than a month, he feels unsettled.

What’s interesting is that besides programming, Gavin Wood is especially fascinated by game theory and economics. He has designed strategy board games, and he has even proposed a new voting system to the UK’s Supreme Court. These two interests ultimately pulled him into the blockchain world—because blockchain is, at its core, the perfect combination of technology and game theory.

In 2013, when Gavin Wood reexamined Bitcoin, he suddenly realized that IT and game theory could be combined. That same year, he met Vitalik Buterin through a friend. After hearing V God’s ideas about Ethereum, he decided to help turn them into code. In 2014, in Miami, Gavin Wood and Vitalik and others co-founded Ethereum. He developed the first working implementation of Ethereum (PoC 1 version), and he also served as Ethereum’s first CTO.

During Ethereum’s development, Gavin Wood did an enormous amount of critical work. He wrote the famous “Ethereum Yellow Paper,” in which the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) is officially defined. He also designed the Solidity programming language, which later became the standard tool for writing smart contracts. Building the general platform architecture and completing the C++ client—these were among the things he did. In 2015, Gavin Wood proposed the concept of Web3.0, with the goal of building a decentralized, free network environment.

But later, Gavin Wood and Vitalik developed disagreements over Ethereum’s direction. He did not agree with governance through hard forks, and he also believed that paying transaction fees only with ETH went against the original intention of a “decentralized platform for free competition.” In 2016, he left Ethereum, founded EthCore, and it later evolved into Parity Technologies.

In the same year, Gavin Wood published the Polkadot white paper. This project was where he truly wanted to realize his Web3.0 vision. Polkadot uses a heterogeneous sharded multi-chain architecture with a “relay chain + parachains” model, where each chain can have its own business logic. The most impressive part is that Polkadot designed a set of on-chain democratic governance mechanisms that can be upgraded without hard forks.

At the 2018 Web3 Summit, Gavin Wood demonstrated something called Substrate on the spot—building a blockchain from scratch on a new Apple laptop in half an hour. Substrate is a blockchain development framework distilled from his Polkadot development experience; it modularizes common components such as consensus, accounts, and tokens, allowing developers to quickly build their own blockchains.

In 2019, Gavin Wood came up with Kusama again—the canary network for Polkadot. He called it a “canary network” because coal miners would bring canaries into the mine to detect danger. Kusama is not just a testnet; it is a long-term network with real economic value, enabling Polkadot to observe various mechanisms in a more realistic environment.

The wildest part is Parathreads. It’s said that Gavin Wood hadn’t thought of this yet during a speech in Beijing; on the way to Shanghai, he revised his PPT overnight and came up with the complete design in a single day and night. Parathreads solve the retirement problem of parachains and lower the high entry barrier, allowing projects to use Polkadot network resources on demand.

Looking at Gavin Wood’s stories, you’ll find that he’s not only a technical expert, but a true creator. He turns ideas into code and solves problems himself. In his view, innovation isn’t about patching and improving—it’s about creating something completely different. Besides blockchain, he also loves art, philosophy, music, and skiing, and he is a black belt in taekwondo.

What’s interesting is that Gavin Wood once said that if he retired from blockchain, he would go into music. But honestly, if he really retired, it would be a huge loss for the entire industry. Because there are plenty of thinkers and talented programmers, but creators like him—who can both come up with great ideas and build them brick by brick—are truly rare.