- Ethereum co-founder spoke to DL News as Polkadot, his answer to Ethereum, drops 50%
- Polkadot faces criticism from users after spending a lot of money on marketing.
- Wood spoke about the emergence of his DJ alter ego.
When Polkadot Blockchain Academy students completed their five-week developer bootcamp in Hong Kong earlier this year, it was time to celebrate.
Gathering for the graduation ceremony, members of the DeFi network saw a familiar face take a stand behind the DJ deck – Gavin Wood, co-founder of Polkadot and one of the brains behind Ethereum.
First up is a song by French musician NTO. Then come songs by Daft Punk and Franz Ferdinand.
Welcome to Gavin Wood’s next act.
After playing a key role in building the DeFi ecosystem for a decade, Wood, 44, is returning to his original passion: music.
“If you see anything posted with DJ Wasabi, that’s me,” Wood said. DL News.
Looking for a groove
His decision comes as Polkadot, a so-called “blockchain of blockchains,” struggles to find its stride.
In 2023, Parity Technologies, the company building the Polkadot network, cut nearly a third of its 385 employees because it was running out of money, employees said.
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Polkadot was once a top 10 cryptocurrency company 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 came under renewed fire when critics lambasted its decision to spend $87 million in the first six months of the year.
Nearly half of that sum was spent on marketing initiatives, including $400,000 to create an animated version of the Polkadot logo on crypto site CoinMarketCap.
“It’s insane to me how much money the Polkadot treasury is wasting on misplaced marketing,” Seun Lanlege, former lead developer at Parity, said on X.
A Parity representative said that marketing spending is a result of the project’s governance system. “Spend on marketing initiatives is a direct result of on-chain treasury spending voted on by the community,” the representative said. DL News.
As Wood turns to DJing, many in DeFi may wonder if he is disengaging from his day job.
Wood has dismissed those concerns and downplayed his role in the project, even though he is Parity’s chief architect.
“I’m much lower in the pile,” he said.
“I am a scientist”
At the Web3 Summit in August, Wood spoke with DL News at the Funkhaus in Berlin, a former East German radio centre, now a studio and concert hall.
It was a fitting place to chat as the Lancaster, England native shared his approach to blockchain design and technology.
“I want to conduct experiments. I am a researcher, a scientist, an academic,” he said. “Curiosity is my main driving force here.”
“The biggest problem for Polkadot was that Ethereum, to some extent, had stagnated.”
Wood does indeed have a knack for unusual projects. He’s preparing to launch an “individuality” system later this year to tattoo people with machine-generated designs that look like QR codes.
Wood’s career began with a mix of computers and music.
In 2005, Wood completed a five-year PhD at the University of York, where he studied how computers listen to music. He also created a visual representation of what the machine hears.
His thesis shows what Dave Brubeck’s classic jazz piece, Take Five, would sound like on a computer.
Wood has also dabbled in technology projects.
He worked as a researcher for Microsoft and taught geometry at a Catholic school in Italy. He sold lighting systems to London nightclubs and bars, then tried to launch a Microsoft Word plug-in to automate the tedious work 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 pursued while creating this Word plugin in the early 2010s.
Inventing 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 Yellow Paper, the first formal explanation of what the network was supposed to do and how.
“I also bring a lot more design and engineering, I would say, like a kind of almost artistic nature,” he said. DL News.
Even though Wood has cemented his place in crypto by co-creating a blockchain system that has become the cornerstone of decentralized finance, he complains about Ethereum’s lack of momentum.
“The Ethereum protocol has remained essentially unchanged from the vision Vitalik and I had in 2014,” he said.
In 2016, Wood went solo 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 problem for Polkadot was that Ethereum, to some extent, had stagnated,” he said. “I wanted to build.”
The project raised $144 million in 2017 through an initial coin offering, a crypto crowdfunding effort in which people invest real money in exchange for the network’s native tokens. It officially began producing blocks in 2020.
During the 2021 boom, its total value soared to $54 billion and DOT became one of the top 10 cryptocurrencies.
Bulky bridges
He also launched blockchain to solve the major bottlenecks facing Ethereum.
Layer 2 blockchains — mini blockchains that bundle 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 its own parachain can easily interact with other Polkadot-based projects.
For Ethereum-based layer 2 networks, users must interact with cumbersome bridges to move funds between networks.
Wood said Polkadot is more like Ethereum’s initial vision.
“Back when everything was about fields, Layer 2 was not a dream,” he said. “The dream that Ethereum core developers were promoting five years ago was a bit like Polkadot.”
A strange slaughter
In April, he furthered that vision with a Polkadot upgrade called JAM, an acronym for Join-Accumalate Machine. Instead of builders auctioning off a parachain, JAM will allow anyone to build one.
This upgrade is not just technical. It comes at a time when Polkadot is trying to rekindle the interest it received in 2021.
It hasn’t been easy to overcome the long period of stagnation that has plagued DeFi.
Not only did Parity have to cut its workforce significantly because of its high executive salaries, but the cuts were handled clumsily, employees said.
The company announced the layoffs a week before the company’s withdrawal from Mallorca, without specifying exactly who would leave.
A Parity employee then called it a “surreal and tasteless joke.” Wood did not attend the beach retreat, leaving many angry and confused.
In July, Parity completed its reorganization and is hiring new employees. Its job board lists 11 open positions, a Parity representative said.
Wood could raise eyebrows again with his next project, which he calls “ink proof.”
At Web3 Summit, Wood explained how the Polkadot blockchain could generate unique tattoo patterns. These patterns would prove that a person is who they say they are online without revealing any other information. In the cryptocurrency space, so-called Sybil attacks, where a user creates multiple identities, are a common problem.
Wood showed off his own QR-like code on his bicep. He’s working on more designs before launching in late 2024.
“I would really hate for it to be said that this is some kind of tattoo identification system.”
The practice of tattooing identifying information on people’s skin can provoke strong reactions, especially in a country like Germany. Wood is irritated by the implication.
“I spent a lot of time emphasizing that this is not an identification issue,” he said. DL News“It’s about individuality. I spent a lot of time emphasizing privacy and how that requires using strong cryptography to ensure privacy.”
“I would really hate for it to be said that this is some kind of tattoo identification system, because that would be complete misinformation.”
The project shows how Wood follows his instincts no matter where they lead him, whether it’s crypto-related tattoos or making music as DJ Wasabi.
“For me, it’s not really worth trying unless it’s something new,” he said. “I’m an experimenter.”
Update: The article was updated on September 4 to reflect Parity’s hiring and governance practices around marketing spend.
Liam Kelly is a DeFi correspondent for DL News. Got a tip? Email him at liam@dlnews.com.
