Key Takeaways
- Gavin Wooden has introduced his resignation as CEO of Parity Applied sciences, the company entity behind Polkadot.
- Wooden stays majority shareholder of the corporate however defined that CEO was not a job he ever significantly wished.
- He joins an extended record of crypto execs who’ve resigned because the summer season.
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Gavin Wooden, the co-founder of Polkadot and its canary community Kusama, has stepped apart as CEO at Parity Applied sciences however stays its majority shareholder.
And One other One’s Gone
Polkadot co-founder Gavin Wooden has left his place as CEO of Parity Applied sciences, the company entity behind the Polkadot blockchain. Parity co-founder Björn Wagner will assume the function of CEO.
In a statement launched immediately, Wooden justified his resolution by explaining that he considers his temperament unsuited to the function of CEO in the long run.
“The function of CEO has by no means been one which I’ve coveted,” he wrote. “I can act at being a CEO nicely sufficient for a short time, nevertheless it’s not the place I’m going to seek out everlasting happiness.”
“Anybody who has labored with me is aware of the place my coronary heart lies. I’m a thinker, coder, designer and architect,” Wooden defined. “Like many such individuals, I work finest asynchronously; a fantastic day is taking 10 hours straight to suppose out some drawback, prototype one thing or collapse some disparate ideas into an article.”
Polkadot gained recognition between 2020 and 2021 for its revolutionary ecosystem design. Somewhat than working on a single blockchain, Polkadot permits for a number of blockchains (known as “parachains”) to function independently but harmoniously with each other by settling transactions on a central “relay chain.” As such, it’s considered a sharded blockchain.
Wooden was additionally a co-founder of Ethereum, an affiliation that helped gasoline the hype round Polkadot.
Polkadot hype translated into huge features final yr for anybody who had the wherewithal to promote at its high in November. Nevertheless, like many of the crypto market, it has suffered dramatically in 2022. At its peak final November, DOT traded as excessive as $54; that quantity, nonetheless, has dramatically shrunk over 2022 to simply $5.84 immediately.
Wooden joins an extended record of crypto execs who’ve chosen to step away from their positions this yr. Notable CEOs within the crypto house who’ve resigned in simply the previous couple of months embrace huge trade gamers, similar to Celsius CEO Alex Mashinsky, Kraken CEO Jesse Powell, and MicroStrategy’s Michael Saylor.
Disclosure: On the time of writing, the writer of this piece owned DOT, ETH, and a number of other different cryptocurrencies
