Gavin Wood's Next Act: From Co-Creating Ethereum to DJing and Tattooing

After a decade of playing a key role in building the DeFi ecosystem, Wood, 44, is picking up on his original passion — music.

When students of Polkadot’s Blockchain Academy finished their five-week-long developers’ boot camp in Hong Kong earlier this year, it was time to party.

Gathering for the graduation ceremony, the DeFi network’s rank and file watched a familiar face take position behind the DJ rig — Gavin Wood, Polkadot’s co-founder and one of the brains behind Ethereum.

First up: a track by French musician NTO. Daft Punk and Franz Ferdinand songs came next.

Welcome to Gavin Wood’s next act.

After a decade of playing a key role in building the DeFi ecosystem, Wood, 44, is picking up on his original passion — music.

“If you see anything published with DJ Wasabi, that’s me,” Wood told DL News.

His move comes as Polkadot, a so-called blockchain of blockchains network, has struggled to find a groove.

In 2023, Parity Technologies, the company building the Polkadot network, cut nearly a third of its 385-strong staff because it was running out of money, according to employees.

Polkadot used to be a top 10 crypto venture in terms of token value. This year, its DOT token has tumbled 50% even as ETH has increased 5% and archrival Cardano has tumbled 45%.

In July, Polkadot took more heat when critics blasted its decision to spend $87 million in the first six months of the year.

Almost half of that was spent on marketing initiatives, which included $400,000 to make an animated version of the Polkadot logo on the crypto site CoinMarketCap.

“It’s insane to me how much money the Polkadot treasury is wasting on misplaced marketing,” Seun Lanlege, former core developer at Parity, said on X.

With Wood turning to DJing, many in DeFi may wonder whether he’s disengaging from his day job.

Wood dismissed such concerns and downplayed his role at the project, even though he is Parity’s chief architect.

“I’m much lower down in the stack,” he said.

During the Web3 Summit in August, Wood spoke to DL News at Berlin’s Funkhaus, a former East German radio centre, now a studio and concert venue.

It was a fitting place to talk as the Lancaster, England native shared how he approaches blockchain design and technology.

“I want to run experiments. I’m a researcher, I’m a scientist, I’m an academic,” he said. “Curiosity is my main driving factor here.”

Indeed, Wood has a knack for pursuing unusual ventures. He’s preparing to roll out an “individuality” system later this year to tattoo people with machine-generated designs that look like QR codes.

Wood’s career started with a mashup of computer science and music.

In 2005, Wood completed a five-year PhD program at the University of York, where he researched how computers listen to music. He also created a visual representation of what the machine heard.

His thesis shows what Dave Brubeck’s classic jazz number Take Five would look like according to a computer.

In Gavin Wood's visualisation of Take Five, yellow indicated sax solos and cymbal hits, blue and green represented piano and bass, and red was drums. Courtesy of Gavin Wood

Wood dallied in tech projects, too.

He worked as a researcher for Microsoft and taught geometry in a Catholic school in Italy. He sold lighting systems to nightclubs and bars in London, and then tried to launch a Microsoft Word plug-in to automate the tedious work of lawyers.

Before long, he met Vitalik Buterin, Jeffrey Wilcke, and Charles Hoskinson, who were developing Ethereum. For Wood, Ethereum was essentially a weekend project he pursued while building that Word plug-in in the early 2010s.

He wrote one of the first Ethereum clients — a software application that lets developers interact with the blockchain — in the programming language C++. Wood helped invent Ethereum’s programming language, Solidity, and co-authored the Yellow Paper, the first formal explainer of what the network was meant to do and how.

“I also bring a lot more design and engineering, I would say, like an almost artistic kind of nature,” he told DL News.

Even though Wood cemented his place in crypto by co-creating a blockchain system that became the cornerstone of decentralised finance, he complains that Ethereum lacks dynamism.

“The Ethereum protocol has essentially remained unchanged compared to the vision that Vitalik and I had back in 2014,” he said.

In 2016, Wood struck out on his own and co-founded Polkadot with Robert Habermeier and Peter Czaban. The idea was to create a more efficient and affordable network to support dApps and smart contracts.

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