I only recently truly understood why so many developers regard Gavin Wood as a legendary figure. His story is actually quite interesting—so low-key that the general public almost doesn’t know who he is, but his status in the tech community is unmatched.

It’s a bit funny to say, but the name Gavin Wood isn’t as loud as “Satoshi Nakamoto” or “Vitalik Buterin,” but once you see what he has done, you’ll understand. He wrote the initial code for Ethereum, created the formal specifications for the EVM, invented the Solidity language, and developed next-generation blockchain protocols like Polkadot. Now, Polkadot has become one of the top projects by market cap, and more and more people are curious about who this person really is.

Interestingly, his image is completely different from what most people imagine a programmer to be. Short grayish-white hair, a fitted T-shirt paired with jeans, and he often has a beer in hand during speeches. Starting from when his mother gave him an old computer at age 9, he became obsessed with programming. Later, he earned a master’s and PhD in computer science at York University (focusing on human-computer interaction and music visualization), and after graduation, he has been coding nonstop.

The things he has done are incredibly diverse—providing technical consulting for Microsoft Research, designing intelligent lighting systems for top nightclubs in London, developing smart contract editors, and creating audio visualization plugins. From these experiences, it’s clear that Gavin Wood has an almost obsessive passion for creating new things and solving problems. He once went over a month without writing code and felt uncomfortable all over. To him, code isn’t just work; it’s art.

Besides programming, he was also very interested in economics and game theory early on. He developed strategy games, designed voting systems, and even proposed a new voting method to the UK Supreme Court (though it was not adopted). These two interests ultimately led him into the blockchain space—technology plus game theory is a perfect match. When he revisited Bitcoin in 2013, he began to realize what this combination could bring.

In 2013, he met Vitalik Buterin through a friend, and after hearing about Ethereum’s ideas, Gavin decided to help turn it into code. In 2014, he co-founded Ethereum with Vitalik and others in Miami. During this period, he developed the first working version of Ethereum, served as its first CTO, authored the Ethereum Yellow Paper defining the EVM, and designed Solidity. Basically, Ethereum’s successful launch was made possible by his strong engineering skills.

In 2015, he proposed the concept of Web3.0—building a decentralized, free internet that breaks internet monopolies and returns data and privacy to users. But later, he left Ethereum, founded EthCore, which eventually became Parity Technologies. He was not very supportive of Ethereum’s governance through hard forks and believed that paying transaction fees solely in ETH, which deviates from the original idea of “free competition and decentralized platforms,” was problematic.

In 2016, Gavin Wood published the Polkadot white paper, outlining the “heterogeneous multi-chain” architecture. He said the goal of creating Polkadot was to “make blockchain great again,” aiming to push the industry forward. This might sound a bit confident, but once you understand Polkadot, you realize it’s not just bragging. Polkadot seeks to solve several fundamental issues in the industry: scalability, architectural flexibility, and governance upgradeability.

Polkadot uses an “intermediate relay chain + multiple parallel chains” heterogeneous sharding architecture, where each chain can run in parallel and have its own logic. The smartest part is that it solves the blockchain “fork” problem—previously, upgrades required soft forks, and disagreements led to hard forks. Polkadot designed an on-chain democratic governance mechanism, allowing the community to reach consensus on the chain and upgrade via Runtime updates. This way, the network can evolve with the times, and the community won’t split due to disagreements.

If Ethereum proved Gavin Wood’s legendary engineering capability, then Polkadot’s design proves he is also a great thinker. When ideas and actions perfectly merge, we call such a person a “creator.”

At the 2018 Web3 conference, he opened a brand-new Apple laptop and, within half an hour, built a blockchain from scratch using the Substrate framework. Substrate is a blockchain development framework he abstracted from Polkadot’s development—because he realized that building a blockchain from scratch is too complex and would hinder innovation. So, he modularized common components, allowing developers to quickly build blockchains by choosing and assembling modules.

In 2019, he launched Kusama, calling it the “canary network.” This is Polkadot’s testnet with real economic value and its own token, allowing Polkadot to observe various mechanisms in a more realistic environment beforehand. This model was almost a first in the blockchain world, and later, many projects in the Polkadot ecosystem began to imitate it.

Even more impressively, before his speech at the Polkadot China Tour in Shanghai, he stayed up all night revising his PPT, adding the “parathread” design. This wasn’t just a concept; it was already quite well thought out—how it runs, how to incentivize, how to integrate into the existing design—all figured out in just one night. Parathreads solve two major issues in Polkadot’s original design: the retirement of parallel chains and the high entry barrier.

Beyond technology, Gavin Wood also loves art, philosophy, music, skiing, and photography, and he holds a black belt in Taekwondo. He has a natural curiosity about the world, and perhaps in his eyes, blockchain is just a large-scale social experiment. He once said that if he retired from blockchain, he would pursue music, which would make him happy. But if he truly retired, it would be a huge loss for the industry. Thinkers are common, and there are many excellent programmers, but someone like Gavin Wood—who can conceive of great ideas and build them brick by brick—is truly rare in this industry.