Ethereum co-founder's bold bet on better blockchains nearly ready to bust out

Gavin Wood has already done more for the blockchain ecosystem than most could imagine, co-founding Ethereum as well as Parity Technologies. But with Parity's new tool Substrate just a few weeks from launch, he could be just getting started. Substrate is a general-purpose development tool, designed to allow anyone to build and deploy their own blockchain. It might help to think of it as a more flexible version of what can be done already on top of Ethereum.

One of the most important innovations is the way Substrate allows for new code to be deployed on distributed blockchains, attempting to solve some of the core challenges of existing projects: the hard fork, which often leads to contentious debates that are not easily seen or understood in public. Wood called them a "nightmare" when speaking with CoinDesk. With Substrate, individual updates to the code powering a network can be achieved through a simple vote of current token holders. This allows faster changes with more transparency. He's been disappointed that existing blockchains can't keep up with technology as internecine debates thwart progress and hopes Substrate can help make opaque project governance a thing of the past. (Source: CoinDesk)