Polkadot, Ethereum Co-Founder Gavin Wood Leaves Parity CEO Role

Polkadot co-founder Gavin Wood has left his position as the CEO of Parity, the company that spearheads Polkadot development.

Polkadot launched in 2020 and is the world’s eighth-largest blockchain by market capitalization. It uses a parachain model that allows applications to build their own customized blockchains that inherit their security from the main Polkadot chain, obviating the need to spin up their own validator sets.

Wood, who also co-founded Ethereum, will be replaced by Bjorn Wagner, who had been serving as chief commercial officer and is one of the company’s co-founders.

In a blog post announcing his departure, Wood said he did not relish the role of CEO, which he assumed in 2020.

“I can act at being a CEO well enough for a short while, but it’s not where I’m going to find eternal happiness,” he wrote. “I will remain the company’s majority shareholder and retain a title befitting my desired workload: Chief Architect.”

In his new role, Wood will focus on “making Polkadot and Web3 more relevant to large swathes of the population” by “helping the community design and build several interesting chain-integrated social primitives which I think are crucial for us to deliver a true Web3 platform.”

Parity was founded in 2015, and Wagner joined in 2016 as a co-founder.

“There was little chance of this role ever being appointed to anyone I did not already know and trust for many years,” Wood wrote. “As the company’s majority shareholder and someone who intends to be working within it for some time to come, I care deeply about its culture.”

As of 5 p.m. New York time Friday, Polkadot is down almost 5% in the past 24 hours.