Biography: Gavin Wood has a well-traveled educational background, touting a master’s degree in engineering from England’s University of York. After receiving his master’s, he went on to earn his PhD in philosophy from the University of York. Wood has deep experience in the computer programming world, including consultation work for Microsoft Research. He has a tally of crypto industry achievements under his belt, including his work as one of the founders of Polkadot, which aims to provide an interoperable blockchain-based internet filled with applications and solutions that work together in a decentralized fashion. Wood also founded Kusama, which serves as a testing ground of sorts for Polkadot. A co-founder of the Ethereum blockchain as well, Wood has been in the cryptocurrency and blockchain space for a long time. His initial introduction to Bitcoin was in 2011, although he did not catch the crypto bug until 2013 when he dove deeper into the technology and its far-reaching potential. Wood completed a notable amount of early work on Ethereum, such as his collaborative work designing the early tech for the Ethereum Virtual Machine. His other endeavors include co-founding the Web3 Foundation and Parity Technologies. The Web3 Foundation helps entities such as Polkadot and Kusama via research, funding, advocacy and collaboration. Wood is actually credited with coming up with the term “Web3” back in 2014. He also invented the proof-of-authority blockchain consensus, the Whisper protocol and the Solidity contract language.