Gavin Wood

Bio

When Gavin first read about Bitcoin in 2011, he was largely uninterested, focusing too much on the currency aspect rather than the technology. However, when he revisited it in early 2013, he began to realise new possibilities opening up between the fields of ITC and game theory, and the inevitable social change to which this would lead. A mutual friend made the introduction to Vitalik Buterin (Ethereum Founder) in late 2014 and Ethereum has dominated Gavin Wood’s life since. Gavin coded the first functional implementation of Ethereum, devised the Solidity contract language and wrote the Yellow Paper, the first formal specification of any blockchain protocol and one of the key ways Ethereum distinguishes itself from other blockchain­based systems. Prior to Ethereum, Gavin earned a masters degree and doctorate in computer science. He consulted for Microsoft Research on technical aspects of embedded domain­-specific languages, and was involved in several startups in the areas of realtime semantic extraction and presentation for music, visual meta­-programming systems and automated legal text analysis.