Free-trust technologist and founder of Polkadot, currently focused on building the Polkadot Protocol. Gavin co-founded Ethereum in 2014 as Co-Founder and CTO of Ethereum Foundation, coding a full implementation of the protocol and authoring the Yellow Paper, the first formal specification of any blockchain protocol. He co-designed the Ethereum protocol alongside Vitalik Buterin, including the EVM, gas, and the caller-pays account model, invented the Solidity programming language, and coined industry terms including “Web3,” “allegality,” and “Proof-of-Authority.”
Following his departure from Ethereum Foundation, Gavin founded Parity Technologies, where he serves as Founder and Chief Architect, alongside the Web3 Foundation. Together with both organizations, he proposed and helped create and launch Polkadot and Kusama, a heterogeneous, scalable multi-chain protocol and its “canary network.” He is also Co-Founder of Grid Singularity, a decentralised energy platform, and has advised organizations including Blockchain Capital and Polychain Capital.
Gavin holds a master’s degree and PhD in computer science, with doctoral research in music visualization. That same interest shaped his pre-Ethereum consulting work for Microsoft Research on media-analysis and audio-synthesis systems, and lives on in his Moodbar audio-visualization tool. Outside of protocol work, he has designed a strategy board game, a proportional-representation voting system, taught fractals and art to schoolchildren in Italy, and worked on video games at Frontier Developments.
