Polkadot's Gavin Wood Steps Down As CEO

Gavin Wood stepped down as CEO of Parity Technologies, the company that makes Polkadot (DOT). Wood will assume the role of Technical Architect at Parity, and Wood's co-founder at Parity, Björn Wagner, will be the new CEO.

Wood is said to prefer technical work to the day-to-day duties of a CEO, so it's not surprising to see him return to blockchain development. But Wood has been the public face of Polkadot for years, including during the parachain slot auction boom, when the DOT token topped $50 and DOT's market cap was briefly over $50B. Today, DOT tokens are worth about $6 and DOT's market cap is just $6.6B.

Polkadot is a unique blockchain that offers a main blockchain for consensus and an infrastructure for creating other blockchains that connect to the main blockchain. Although Polkadot is known for its strong developer ecosystem, there hasn’t been much retail adoption of projects built on Polkadot. These other blockchains include parachain slot auction winners like Moonbeam and Acala, which garnered excitement at launch but sit down 90%+ from all-time high today.

The DOT token didn't move much in response to Wood's announcement: it dropped about 4% on the day, but that could be related to larger market movements at the time.