Polkadot, the parallel chain protocol

Polkadot has a rich history going all the way back to the founding of Ethereum. In 2013, Polkadot’s founder Gavin Wood was working for 0xlegal, a legal software provider, as its Director of Technology. Wood has been following Bitcoin for a couple of years and came across a story about Ami Taaki, the renowned anarchist revolutionary and Bitcoin contributor. He decided to reach out to Taaki and to his surprise, Taaki invited him to a couple of meetups in London. It was during one of those meetups that Taaki mentioned Vitalik Buterin and his vision for a project called Ethereum. Taaki recommended that Wood connect with Buterin to work on the development of Ethereum. Wood would soon take Taaki’s recommendation, becoming one of the co-founders of Ethereum and its first CTO.

After leading Ethereum as its CTO for the first 18–24 months, co-inventing the Solidity contract language and writing Ethereum’s technical Yellow Paper during his tenure, Wood decided to step down from his role to start a new company. In late 2015, Wood, along with a few Ethereum alumni, launched Parity Technologies (then called Ethcore), a blockchain technology development firm.