Polkadot Co-founder Steps Down as CEO of Parity

Gavin Wood, co-founder of Polkadot, and CEO of Parity Technologies, the key backer behind the ecosystem, announced that he is stepping down from the role.

Gavin Wood, the co-founder of the Polkadot ecosystem, is stepping down as the CEO of blockchain infrastructure company Parity Technologies – the development company behind Polkadot. Wood shared a statement on October 21 in which he states that he never wanted to assume the role of CEO and although he could act as such for an interim period, it was not a role in which he saw himself finding “eternal happiness,” saying:

Anyone who has worked with me knows where my heart lies. I’m a thinker, coder, designer, and architect. Like many such people, I work best asynchronously. A good CEO needs to be available to others on a far more continuous basis. They need to enjoy representing the company, both internally and externally. They need to not be bothered by large swathes of their time becoming eaten up in meetings and calls with a plethora of multicoulored boxes on their calendar.

The former CEO indicated that he would remain the company’s majority shareholder and will take on the role of chief architect. The co-founder of Parity, Björn Wagner, will take over as the new CEO. The company was founded in 2015 as EthCore, by Wood, Aeron Buchanan, TJ Saw, Ken Kappler, and Jutta Steiner, with Björn Wagner. Wagner joined as co-founder a year later. Wood added in the statement that he will contribute to making Polkadot and Web 3 more relevant to large swathes of the population. He indicated that he would be refocusing on “exploring how we can contribute to making Polkadot and Web3 more relevant to large swathes of the population,” adding that this will start by “helping the community design and build several interesting chain-integrated social primitives which I think are crucial for us to deliver a true Web3 platform.”

Although Wood’s reasons for stepping down as CEO differ vastly from most, he does join a host of top executives that have recently decided to hand over management such as Jesse Powell from Kraken and Alex Mashinsky from Celsius.

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