Gavin Woods’s perspective on Polkadot and the state of digital currencies

Born in April of 1980, Gavin Woods is a renowned British computer scientist famous for his contributions in the development of the blockchain ecosystem. He is the co-founder as well as the former Chief Technical Officer of Ethereum having managed to successfully code the first functional implementation of Ethereum back in January 2014. He invented solidity (a programming language that is contract-oriented for writing smart contracts), wrote the Ethereum Yellow Paper and also significantly contributed to the authoring of the polkadot paper.

Gavin Woods is also a controversial figure in equal measures given his choice of abandoning his Ethereum project in a bid to chase his broader visions of the future. He was also in the spotlight for downplaying the importance of Polkadot’s Poc-1 by crudely comparing it to the original Poc-1 of Ethereum.

Woods insight on polkadot

Polkadot seems to have kicked off on a good note given the launch of its Poc-1 back in May following the completion of ICO last autumn which in itself was successful. In an interview with ETHNews, woods submitted his understanding of a ‘heterogeneous multi-chain framework’- what he commonly refers to Polkadot. “A multi-chain is a system made of several chains of blocks, each working in parade yet able to interact with each other. It thus becomes ‘heterogeneous multi-chain’ when the rules governing the progression of the constituent blocks are different.” Woods stated.

According to Woods, Polkadot retains its chronology lockstep. This implies that finality of a function or process is assigned and coordinated by the relay chain. Therefore Polkadot can be defined as a community of parallel chains that are held by the relay chain as opposed to being just parallel chains in their entirety. He is optimistic that in future, Polkadot will be able to smoothen interactions between and among various blockchain structures such as bitcoin and Ethereum.

Woods on the state of digital currencies

According to woods, many people believed that the internet was going to be a transformative technology for the society. However, its flexibility allowed business and institutions to move their traditional models of operations into the digital space. It is therefore in his sober view that the internet has not been as transformative as was much expected.

Therefore the establishment of the digital currencies and decentralized systems can be deemed as the first step towards that transformative agenda. The probability of the international bodies such as IMF recognising digital currencies, however, remains minimal as their bimodal power system ensure they retain their free currency state, at least for now, which is not in line with regulations of such international bodies as IMF.

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