Co-founder of Polkadot Gavin Wood is stepping down from his position as chief executive officer of Parity Technologies, an infrastructure company that helps support the crypto project. He will continue to occupy the position of chief architect and largest shareholder in the company. Despite the continuous squeeze on the market, Parity has not let up on its efforts to hire new employees. Eran Barak had been recruited by the company earlier to serve as the company’s chief operating officer.
Polkadot is a platform that enables numerous blockchains to communicate with one another. Wood, who was also a co-founder of Ethereum, was instrumental in raising public awareness of the platform. According to data provided by CoinGecko, the DOT token issued by Polkadot has a market value of $6.8 billion, ranking it as the eleventh most valuable cryptocurrency.
In 2015, Woods created Parity Technologies. This company is in charge of developing the Kusama and Polkadot blockchain ecosystems respectively. Polkadot is a proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus blockchain that enables developers to establish their own blockchains that are able to communicate with other ledgers via a system of parachains.
The Main Reason Behind This Huge Step
Wood provided an explanation for his choice in a statement that was made public today. He defended his decision by stating that he believes his temperament is unsuited to the post of CEO over the long run. He stated that the position of CEO was not one that he had ever desired to have in the past. Wood went on to say that he is capable of playing the role of CEO convincingly for a limited amount of time, but that it is not the path that will lead him to lasting happiness.
The cofounder of Polkadot claims that those who have worked alongside him have a good understanding of his priorities. He stated that he is a thinker, coder, designer, and engineer, and like many other individuals in his line of work, he works best asynchronously; he considers it a fantastic day when he devotes ten consecutive hours to thinking about some issue, prototyping something, or consolidating a variety of concepts into an article.
In his official statement, Gavin Wood said, “Over these last two years, quite possibly the largest element of the job as CEO has been to preside over the outfitting of our C-suite. I saw this essentially as a means of freeing myself up to return to work full-time where I belong, on technology. With the help of Björn and Jimmy Cliff, our COO, I’m very happy to say that the process is close to completion and Parity has really leveled up its capabilities with the new hires.”
What Does It Mean For Polkadot?
Woods was a computer scientist at Microsoft prior to his involvement with the Ethereum blockchain project and Parity Technologies. Later on, he shifted his focus to cryptocurrencies and helped found Ethereum, which is currently the second-largest cryptocurrency when measured by market cap. Later on, Woods was also heavily involved in the creation of the programming language Solidity, which is employed in the drafting of smart contracts.
Polkadot’s popularity was aided in no small part by the fact that Wood was also one of the co-founders of Ethereum. In the years 2020 and 2021, Polkadot became increasingly well-known for the original ecosystem design it featured. Instead of running on a single blockchain, Polkadot sets transactions on a central “relay chain,” which enables many blockchains, or “parachains,” to run independently of one another while yet interacting in a manner that is compatible with one another. Consequently, it is a sharded blockchain.
The euphoria surrounding Polkadot resulted in significant increases in 2021, but its price has experienced a significant decline over the course of the past year, in line with the rest of the cryptocurrency market. DOT reached its all-time high in November of the preceding year, when it traded for as much as $54. However, that value has significantly decreased since 2022, and it currently trades for only $5.84.
This year has seen a significant number of crypto industry executives make the decision to resign from their roles, and Wood is the latest to do so. Big leaders in the business, such as Celsius CEO Alex Mashinsky, Kraken CEO Jesse Powell, and MicroStrategy’s Michael Saylor, are examples of notable CEOs in the cryptocurrency space who have stepped down in the past several months.
