Solidity inventor Gavin Wood, co-founder of Ethereum, announced that he is stepping down as CEO of Parity Technologies, the company behind Polkadot and Kusama. After the news, the cryptocurrencies of the altcoin project started to decline.
Gavin Wood resigned
The recognized CEO will remain one of the company’s largest shareholders despite his resignation. Now the vacant CEO position is taken over by commercial officer Björn Wagner. Wood and Wagner founded Parity Technologies together in 2015. The company continued to expand its staff despite the cuts in the bear market. Eran Barak, a computer scientist graduated from Tel Aviv University, was appointed chief operating officer of the company.
Former Parity Technologies co-founder and CEO Jutta Steiner stepped down in November 2021 after having been at the helm of the company since 2015. Gavin Wood has filled that position ever since.
Altcoin price fell sharply after the announcement
Gavin Wood’s resignation ended with approximately 5% depreciation for Polkadot (DOT) price. Polkadot, one of the biggest “Ethereum killers”, is down 90% since its November peak. The altcoin is currently trading at $5.87. It found a temporary bottom in the $5.77 region after the news. For now, sales seem to have cooled and DOT is recovering.
Meanwhile, according to data from GitHub, Polkadot made over 500 contributions each day in September. Concurrently, data from Polkadot’s cross-consensus interoperability standard XCM shows a record 26,258 messages were sent between its parachains. In August, Polkadot received a total of 14,930 contributions from GitHub developers.
