Gavin Wood

Ethereum co-founder and its first CTO. Wrote the Yellow Paper, the formal specification of the Ethereum Virtual Machine, and proposed Solidity. Known onchain as gavofyork.

Gavin Wood co-founded Ethereum and served as its first chief technology officer. He wrote the Yellow Paper, the formal specification that defines the Ethereum Virtual Machine, and proposed Solidity, the language most Ethereum contracts are still written in. He led the C++ client that ran alongside Geth on the early network, and afterwards founded Parity Technologies, the Web3 Foundation and Polkadot. The term Web3 is his, coined in 2014. This address was allocated 20 ETH in the genesis block. In August 2015, in the first weeks of the live network, it deployed Ethereum's first name registries, ending with an ExpRegistrar whose constructor reserves the name gavofyork.