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

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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 discussed 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

Links mentioned in this episode:
- 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 also available on :
- Epicenter.tv: https://epicenter.tv/259
- YouTube: http://youtu.be/eP4mT19S_jg
- Souncloud: http://soundcloud.com/epicenterbitcoin/eb-259

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Epicenter is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain, Sébastien Couture, Meher Roy & Sunny Aggarwal.