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As Polkadot plunged 50%, Gavin Wood decided to become a DJ

BlockBeatsBlockBeats2024/09/06 05:35
By:BlockBeats

Gavin Wood's "Multiverse": Founder, Scientist, Experimenter, Now: DJ Wasabi.

Original title: Gavin Wood on why Ethereum remains 『unchanged,』 Polkadot, and moonlighting as a DJ
Original author: Liam Kelly, DL News
Original translation: Lyric, ChainCatcher


Ethereum co-founder Gavin Wood was interviewed by DL News as Polkadot plunged 50%.


After investing heavily in marketing, Polkadot is facing strong opposition from users.


Gavin Wood talked about his other identity - as a DJ.


Earlier this year, when Polkadot students finished a five-week developer training camp in Hong Kong, they had a party. At the graduation ceremony, members of the DeFi network saw a familiar face taking his place behind the DJ booth - Gavin Wood, co-founder of Polkadot and one of the masterminds of Ethereum.


After a decade of playing a key role in building the DeFi ecosystem, Gavin Wood, 44, is returning to his original passion - music. "If you see any articles about DJ Wasabi, that's me," Wood told DL News.


Looking for a new direction


The backdrop of his move comes as Polkadot has been struggling to find a breakthrough.


In 2023, Parity Technologies, the company that built the Polkadot network, laid off nearly a third of its 385 employees due to a shortage of funds, according to employees. Polkadot was once one of the top ten cryptocurrency projects by token value. Its DOT token is down 50% this year, while ETH is up 5% and rival Cardano is down 45%. And in July, Polkadot faced more criticism, with critics slamming its decision to spend $87 million in the first half of the year. Nearly half of that was spent on marketing, including $400,000 to create an animated Polkadot logo on cryptocurrency site CoinMarketCap. "It's crazy that the Polkadot treasury wasted so much money on misguided marketing," former Parity core developer Seun Lanlege said on X.



A Parity representative said the marketing expenses stem from the project’s governance system. “Spending on marketing initiatives is a direct result of on-chain treasury spending as voted on by the community,” the representative told DL News.


With Wood’s transition to DJing, many in DeFi may wonder if he’s out of his day job. Although Wood is Parity’s lead designer, he denies such concerns and downplays his role in the project. “My position is much more junior,” he said.


“I’m a scientist”


Wood spoke to DL News at Funkhaus in Berlin during the Web3 Summit in August. Here, Wood shared his thoughts on blockchain design and technology. "I want to experiment. I'm a researcher, a scientist, an academic, and curiosity is my main driver here," he said. "The biggest problem for Polkadot is that Ethereum has stagnated to some extent." In fact, Wood is good at pursuing unusual adventures. He is preparing to launch a "personality" system later this year to tattoo people with machine-generated QR code-like patterns.


Wood's career began at the fusion of computer science and music.


In 2005, Wood completed a five-year doctoral program at York University, studying how computers listen to music. He also made visual illustrations of the music heard by the machine. His thesis showed what Dave Brubeck's classic jazz piece "Take Five" would sound like to a computer.



Wood has also participated in technology projects. He has worked as a Microsoft researcher and taught geometry at a Catholic school in Italy. He sold lighting systems to nightclubs and bars in London, then tried to launch a Microsoft Word plug-in that would automate tedious tasks for 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 had been working on while developing a Word plug-in 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 Ethereum Yellow Paper, the first document to formally describe what the Ethereum network does and how it works. "I also brought more of a design and engineering side to the table, which is like an almost artistic nature, I would say," he told DL News.


While Wood cemented his place in the cryptocurrency space by co-founding a blockchain system that became a cornerstone of decentralized finance, he felt Ethereum lacked dynamism. “The Ethereum protocol is largely unchanged from the vision that Vitalik and I had in 2014,” he said.


In 2016, Wood struck out on his own, co-founding 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 had become somewhat stagnant,” he said. “I wanted to keep growing.” The project raised $144 million in an initial coin offering in 2017 — a cryptocurrency crowdfunding in which people stake real money in exchange for the network’s native tokens. It began producing blocks in 2020. In the 2021 rush, its total value jumped to $54 billion, making DOT a top-10 cryptocurrency.


Improving "cumbersome" cross-chain


He also launched a blockchain to solve a key bottleneck facing Ethereum. That is, layer 2 blockchains (mini blockchains that aggregate transactions into low-cost proofs and then send them to Ethereum), which are now common on Ethereum.


Polkadot introduced a similar design from day one, called parachains. Any project that chooses to build on Polkadot and launch its own parachain can easily interact with other Polkadot-based projects. For layer 2 networks based on Ethereum, users must interact with clunky cross-chain bridges to transfer funds between networks.


Wood said Polkadot is closer to Ethereum's early vision. “Layer 2 wasn’t a dream back when everything was a blank slate. The dream that Ethereum core developers pushed five years ago looks a bit like Polkadot.”


“I’m an experimenter”


In April, he built on that vision with a Polkadot upgrade called JAM, or Join-Accumalate Machine. JAM will allow anyone to build a parachain, rather than having builders auction one off. The upgrade isn’t just technical. It comes as Polkadot tries to revive its 2021 glory. But getting out of the rut that has plagued DeFi for so long won’t be easy. Employees say Parity not only needed to lay off a lot of employees because of excessive executive pay, but also handled the layoffs awkwardly. The company announced the layoffs a week before it headed to Mallorca, but didn’t say who was being laid off. One Parity employee called it “a surreal, bad joke.” Wood's absence from the beach vacation has angered and confused many. In July, Parity completed a restructuring and is currently hiring new employees. A Parity representative said its job postings list 11 open positions.


Now, Wood may be drawing attention again with his next project, which he calls “proof-of-ink.” At the Web3 Summit, Wood explained how the Polkadot blockchain can generate unique tattoo patterns. These patterns can prove that a person is who they say they are online without revealing other information. It seems to be able to deal with so-called Sybil attacks, where one user creates multiple identities, which is a common problem in cryptocurrency.


Wood showed the QR code on his bicep. He is also working on other designs before launching it in late 2024. “I really don’t want this to be seen as some kind of tattoo identification system.” The practice of tattooing identity markers on skin can cause people to react strongly, especially in places like Germany. Wood bristled at the suggestion.


“I spent a lot of time emphasizing that this is not about identification,” he told DL News. “It’s about personality. I spent a lot of time emphasizing privacy, and this is about using strong cryptography to guarantee privacy. I really don’t want people to say this is a tattoo recognition system because that’s completely misleading.”


The project shows how Wood will always follow his instincts, no matter where that leads him, from getting crypto-related tattoos to performing music as DJ Wasabi. “For me, unless it’s novel, it’s just not worth doing,” he said. “I’m an experimenter.”


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Disclaimer: The content of this article solely reflects the author's opinion and does not represent the platform in any capacity. This article is not intended to serve as a reference for making investment decisions.

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