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Gavin Wood: Substrate, Polkadot and the Case for On-Chain Governance

Episode Summary

Former Ethereum CTO and Parity Founder Gavin Wood joined us to discuss the early days of Ethereum, how Parity came about, their new blockchain framework Substrate and the case for on-chain governance.

Episode Notes

From one of the main Ethereum clients, to Polkadot to Substrate; Parity has become exceptional at developing successful open-source blockchain projects. Their latest effort Substrate provides a framework to easily create custom blockchains. Building on cutting-edge technologies like Web Assembly, Substrate also offers automated on-chain upgrades.

We were joined by Gavin Wood, who was previously co-founder and CTO of Ethereum and founded Parity. We talked about the early Ethereum days, how Parity got started, Substrate, Polkadot and his views on on-chain governance.

Topics covered in this episode:

• The genesis story of Ethereum
• Why Gavin prefers reasoning from first principles to reading
• How Parity shunned Silicon Valley principles to build an developer-driven company
• Why they decided to work on a scalable blockchain from scratch instead of improving Ethereum
• An overview of Substrate
• The relationship between Substrate and Polkadot
• How Substrate allows switching consensus in a live blockchain
• Why Ethereum’s governance process is centralized
• Polkadot and the case for on-chain governance

Episode links:

• Parity Technologies Website
• Polkadot Website
• E199 - Peter Czaban - Polkadot: The Internet of Blockchain Networks
• Substrate: A Rustic Vision for Polkadot by Gavin Wood at Web3 Summit 2018
• Substrate in a nutshell
• What is Substrate?
• How Polkadot tackles the biggest problems facing blockchain innovators
• Substrate testnet launched
• Epicenter episode from 2014 with Gavin Wood about Ethereum & Ether Sale

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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Meher Roy. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/259