Polkadot's Gavin Wood on Building a Layer 0 to Underpin the Entire Blockchain-Based Economy

This week on The Defiant Podcast we speak to Gavin Wood. Gavin’s crypto journey started with Ethereum – he was one of the eight original founders and the project’s CTO in the early days. Today though, he’s busy building Polkadot, a chain that is attempting to improve where Ethereum falls short.

After years of development, the ecosystem’s first applications are finally coming to life as it lays the foundations to become a layer zero, where multiple layer 1 chains and their decentralized applications can flourish. Where does Gavin’s story begin?

Timestamps:
0:00:00 Section 1, Background
0:01:22 Gavin, the early years
0:12:58 Sponsor
0:13:45 Section 2, branching out
0:14:04 Why start a new blockchain?
0:19:31 Why “Polkadot”?
0:22:09 Eth2 vs Polkadot
0:27:51 Powerchain limits
0:33:55 Sponsor
0:34:59 Section 3, the Polkadot ecosystem
0:47:15 Sponsor
0:48:04 Powerchains auctioned
0:50:20 The Polkadot lingo
0:56:43 Will there be multiple relay chains?
0:58:55 Where is Polkadot positioned?
1:04:12 The singular layer 0
1:08:47 Sponsor
1:09:17 Section 4, the web3 future
1:13:43 Can Polkadot sustain global activity?
1:15:06 Criticisms of web3
1:18:30 How is Gavin Defiant?