Polkadot co-founder Gavin Wood steps down as CEO of Parity

• The Polkadot co-founder Gavin Wood will remain as Chief Architect of Parity Technologies Ltd.

Gavin Wood, the co-founder of blockchain platform Polkadot, has stepped down as CEO of Parity Technologies Ltd.

Wood, who founded the blockchain infrastructure provider in 2015 alongside Aeron Buchanan, TJ Saw, Ken Kappler and Jutta Steiner, became CEO in late 2020. 

Wood ‘never coveted’ CEO role

In the company news update published Friday, Wood said he’s exiting the position as that’s not the role in which he feels he can give his best for the company. Indeed, he has “never” coveted the CEO role.

“Anyone who has worked with me knows where my heart lies. I’m a thinker, coder, designer and architect. Like many such people, I work best asynchronously; a great day is taking 10 hours straight to think out some problem, prototype something or collapse some disparate thoughts into an article. The role of CEO has never been one which I have coveted,” he said in the blog post.

Co-founder Björn Wagner takes over as CEO, with Wood continuing as Parity’s Chief Architect – a title he says is more befitting of his “desired workload”. He is also still Parity’s largest shareholder.

“I’ll be pointing my regained focus towards exploring how we can contribute to making Polkadot and Web3 more relevant to large swathes of the population,” he noted.

He expects the focus on Polkadot and Web3 to start with an effort to help the community build the chain-integrated social primitives he believes are critical to the vision of delivering “a true Web3 platform.” 

Wood’s footprint in the blockchain and crypto industry is massive, with him being co-founders of the world’s largest smart contracts platform Ethereum. Other than Polkadot, he also helped develop Kusama.