Interview with Polkadot founder Gavin: From multi-chain networks to world computers, decrypting JAM computing platforms and Web3 innovation paths

Interview: Freya, PANews

Compiled by: Yuliya, PANews

In the development of blockchain technology, Gavin Wood has left a strong mark. As the founder of Polkadot, co-founder of Ethereum and the proposer of the Web3 concept, Gavin Wood is undoubtedly an iconic figure in the blockchain field. In 2025, in the critical year of Polkadot's transformation, Gavin Wood started his Asian tour with the latest technological achievements, JAM (Join-Accumulate Machine). During the event at the Hangzhou site, PANews conducted an exclusive interview with the Web3 industry leader, exploring in-depth Polkadot's technological innovation, ecological development, and his unique insights into the future of Web3.

Gavin Wood's career is full of legend. From a PhD in Computer Science from the University of York, UK to a core developer of Ethereum, to the founding of Polkadot and promoting it to become a leader in the multi-chain ecosystem, every step of his has profoundly influenced the development trajectory of the blockchain industry. However, Gavin Wood is not just a tech geek, he is also a part-time DJ who loves music. In the interview, he admitted that although his current focus is almost entirely on JAM development, he still hopes to regain his identity as a DJ and find balance and inspiration in music. This dual love for technology and art also makes Gavin Wood particularly unique in the field of blockchain.

In the interview, Gavin Wood introduced in detail the many technological breakthroughs that Polkadot has made this year, including the optimization of asynchronous backing, the new SDK release cycle, and the significant improvement in the decentralization of verification nodes. He specifically mentioned that the "Spam Mining" performance benchmark of the Polkadot ecosystem proves its leading position in scalability. In addition, the Web3 Foundation has invested 10 million DOT funds in the development of the JAM ecosystem, aiming to cultivate JAM development teams around the world and promote the implementation of this revolutionary computing platform.

The launch of JAM marks Polkadot's transformation from multi-chain networks to "world computers". Gavin Wood emphasizes that JAM is not just a smart contract system, but a highly general computing platform that can run conventional software and achieve super-large computing capabilities. This technological breakthrough has taken blockchain from the concept of "distributed ledger" to a whole new level, providing unlimited possibilities for future decentralized applications.

Speaking about the future of Web3, Gavin Wood said that realizing true user sovereignty to the Internet is still a long process, but he is confident in Polkadot's role in the process. In addition, Gavin Wood also shared his views on the future of the crypto industry. He believes that despite some short-term speculation in the industry, projects that are truly committed to solving technical problems will eventually stand out. He encourages newcomers and entrepreneurs to remain curious, be brave in experimentation, and have an in-depth understanding of the design intentions and application scenarios of blockchain technology.

The following is a text compilation of the interview:

Key achievements and ecological status

PANews: What are the key achievements of Polkadot this year? Which progress exceeded expectations and which were relatively unsatisfactory enough?

Gavin Wood : 2024 is indeed a turning point, shifting from cutting-edge research to product optimization and stability improvement. It mainly involves two aspects of improvement: one is speed optimization, such as asynchronous backing; the other is development of stability optimization, such as adopting the new SDK release cycle, releasing a long-term support (LTS) version every three months, and performing regular maintenance every two years.

At the end of 2024, we successfully demonstrated the "Spam Mining" performance of the Polkadot ecosystem, and this performance benchmark proves that the project is far ahead of other blockchain projects in terms of scalability.

In addition, the degree of decentralization of verification nodes has also been significantly improved, although this depends more on the guidance of the technical framework than on enforcement.

As for which developments are not satisfactory enough, there are currently no particularly prominent shortcomings. Each of our optimizations was carried out on schedule and achieved the expected results.

PANews: The Web3 Foundation has invested 10 million DOT funds for the development of the JAM (Join-Accumulate Machine) ecosystem. How will these resources be allocated? Are there specific areas (such as DeFi or games) that will be given priority to support?

Gavin Wood : The goal of 10 million DOT funding is to incentivize JAM implementation, not broader ecosystem development. We hope that through this funding, we will establish a decentralized JAM development team so that JAM development no longer depends solely on the Web3 Foundation and Parity, but will expand to a global scale.

Our goal is to develop dozens of JAM development teams and build hundreds of JAM experts so that they can not only develop JAM implementations, but also build services based on these implementations. This is a complex protocol, and the complexity of modern blockchain protocols is getting higher and higher, so talents who have a deep understanding of the protocol are needed to promote the implementation of innovative applications. Therefore, the focus of this funding is not to support specific areas such as DeFi or gaming, but to build a strong technical infrastructure and a professional talent pool.

Fund allocation will be based on the milestone system, with a total of 5 important milestones set up. The last milestone is particularly critical, requiring independent external security audits to ensure that the implemented code is in place for deployment in the actual blockchain environment.

Technological innovation and future planning

PANews: Your proposed "Proof-of-Personhood" plan will be implemented in 2025, aiming to leverage ZK to solve the authentication challenges in the era of generative AI. How will this mechanism affect the entire industry?

Gavin Wood : First of all, it is important to be clear that this system is designed to solve the problem of "individuality" rather than "identity". As people's lives increasingly shift online, the digital world faces a fundamental challenge: how to ensure that the object we interact with is indeed a real human individual.

The complexity of this problem lies in the fact that humans are biological beings, not digital natives. We interact with the digital world through mobile phones, computers and other devices, but in fact it is software that communicates, not people themselves. This situation has become even more serious in the context of the rapid development of generative AI technology. AI systems can now communicate like humans, speaking, writing, understanding text, and even creating pictures and music to understand image content. This combination of technological progress and the in-depth development of social digitalization has brought unprecedented challenges.

Compared to the era before the 1900s, it was difficult for people to be imitated or impersonated by machines because digital systems did not exist yet. And now, we are easily misled to mistake automation systems for real humans. This is the core issue that the individual identity proof mechanism needs to solve.

This technology is designed to rebalance the balance of human-computer interaction in the digital world. Although this problem can behave differently in different societies, it will ultimately become a global challenge. The implementation of a personal identification mechanism will help establish a fundamental truth in the digital world: allowing users to accurately determine whether they are interacting with real people or machines.

PANews: Compared with the early parachain architecture, what are the essential improvements of JAM?

Gavin Wood : JAM represents a major evolution of blockchain. Although from a technical point of view it is just an improvement on Polkadot's existing technology (most of the technology already exists in Polkadot except for JAM virtual machines), its impact is revolutionary in what blockchain can do.

Blockchain was originally called "Distributed Ledger", a term commonly used in the financial industry to describe its functions. But in fact, blockchain is much more than the functions of ledgers, especially after Ethereum introduced smart contracts, it has been given stronger computing power. However, previous blockchains are still limited to a "ledger" model, and JAM aims to build a real "World Computer". It is not just a smart contract system, but a computing platform that can run conventional software and is highly versatile.

In terms of performance, our modeling shows that JAM computing power will increase by 10,000 to 1,000,000 times higher than Ethereum's current level. Of course, models are prone to inaccurate conclusions, and many blockchain projects have the problem of exaggerating publicity. But Polkadot's performance has been verified in real-world environments, and we used the "Toast Small Supercomputer" to make rigorous measurements to ensure the accuracy of these modeling data. If the data is correct, JAM will truly realize super-large-scale computing power, becoming an important milestone in blockchain technology.

PA News : How do you view the future development of Kusama?

Gavin Wood : Kusama was originally designed as Polkadot's "Canary" test network, with its main purpose being to provide a place for experimental purposes for new features and upgrades to Polkadot to verify its feasibility and stability. From this perspective, Kusama does indeed accomplish its mission well.

But now, Kusama should break through its original positioning and keep its experimental nature while shifting its focus to more cutting-edge areas of exploration. Especially in the following directions:

• Zero Knowledge Cryptography
• Identity authentication (Proof-of-Personhood)
• Other areas with innovative potential

In addition, Kusama had 10 million DOTs at the time of creation, and these resources should be used reasonably to support future development.

PA News : Compared with Solana and Ethereum, how do you think Polkadot can better attract developers and users?

Gavin Wood: In the past, there were multiple parachains in the Polkadot ecosystem that provided EVM compatibility, but they were independent ecosystems with their own tokens and teams. This situation has changed in Polkadot 2.0 - Polkadot will natively support EVM-compatible smart contracts and run directly in a DOT environment.

This is an important shift for Polkadot, and while not as thorough as JAM (Join-Accumulate Machine), it is still strategic. It targets Polkadot as a high-performance and scalable smart contract platform and supports Solidity and Ethereum compatibility technology. In addition, trustless bridge solutions such as Hyper Bridge and Snow Bridge within the Polkadot ecosystem will also enable them to interact seamlessly with EVM-compatible networks.

Polkadot's PVM (Polkadot Virtual Machine) is highly versatile and compatible with almost any virtual machine as long as it does not require special runtime support. For example, MoveVM may be suitable for PVM, and SVM (Solana Virtual Machine) obviously meets this standard. This is why Polkadot switches to PVM—its openness allows any language that conforms to determinism and self-contained features to run on it.

In terms of competitive landscape, Polkadot did not deviate from its original route, but chose a more flexible way to adapt to market demand. The Ethereum ecosystem has accumulated a large number of developers, so Polkadot should adopt a more inclusive attitude, rather than sticking to WebAssembly and its unique development methods, but to cater to market needs and support the language and tools that developers like.

Web3 Vision and DOT ETF Outlook

PA News : How far is the industry from a real user-dominated Internet? What changes have happened to Polkadot 's role?

Gavin Wood: Since the concept of Web3 was proposed in 2014, realizing true user sovereignty to the Internet has remained a long process. Although this process is longer than originally expected, this transformation cannot be completed in a short period of time.

Polkadot was originally a heterogeneous and scalable multi-chain network, which is largely similar to Ethereum's development direction in the next four or five years. Although one might point out the specific differences between the two, essentially, Polkadot's original goal was exactly what Ethereum wants to achieve now.

However, with the introduction of JAM, Polkadot's focus has shifted from interoperability to scalability and composability. While multi-chain architectures are still valuable, JAM provides developers with greater freedom to avoid having to be limited to specific patterns. Polkadot has now transformed from a heterogeneous scalable multi-chain network to a "world computer" focusing on scalability and composability. This shift not only enables it to support heterogeneous L2 blockchains, but also makes the deployment and execution of smart contracts more efficient.

PA News : Nasdaq submitted the 19b-4 revision of the DOT spot ETF at the end of February 2024. The market generally expects the DOT spot ETF to be approved in 2025. What impact do you think this will have on the Polkadot ecosystem?

Gavin Wood : The Web3 Foundation has done a lot of work in its previous regulatory environment and is committed to proving that DOT does not fall into the securities category. In addition to then-SEC Chairman Gary Gensler, the dialogue with regulators was generally positive and constructive, and received considerable support. However, there are currently two main uncertainties:

• The current government management has been replaced, which may lead to a change in regulatory attitudes
• The financial market itself is an extremely complex system, and the impact of any policy change is difficult to accurately predict.

Regarding the impact of ETF approval on the ecosystem, I think financial markets are as unpredictable as "black magic". In such a chaotic and complex system, it is difficult to accurately estimate the specific impact of any single action.

Newbie/Entrepreneurial advice

PA News : How do you view the future of the crypto industry? For newcomers, how do they develop their careers in this industry?

Gavin Wood: It depends on their goals. If the "crypto industry" refers to the "token industry" or the "cryptocurrency industry", then the industry is going downhill and at a very fast pace. Rather than trying to solve real technical challenges, more and more projects support fraudulent projects and promote over-centralization, while lacking consideration for broader security.

What is even more disappointing is that some of the people in power are making decisions that enable some industry participants to use public funds to make their own profits. This is not beneficial to the development of the industry. However, I still believe that projects that are truly committed to solving technical problems and can successfully land will eventually surpass speculators who only focus on short-term interests.

2025 may not be a particularly optimistic year. But for those students who are truly committed to innovation and dare to meet challenges, this is still an era of opportunity. While they may not get much attention and may not be able to get enough financial support, we will still see some important technological breakthroughs over the next 18 months.

PA News : What advice are there for entrepreneurs?

Gavin Wood: The key is to truly create value, maintain the spirit of experimentation, and promote innovation. We must deeply understand the design intentions and practical application scenarios of the blockchain system, rather than blindly following the trend. Some projects want to deploy applications on blockchain, but do not understand why blockchain is needed. Some teams also want to create blockchains but do not clarify the necessity.

True innovation comes from in-depth thinking and continuous experimentation. Try boldly, even if nine out of ten experiments fail, it doesn't matter, because the experience of failure is equally valuable, and an occasional success may lead to unexpected breakthroughs. Many great discoveries often come from curiosity and interdisciplinary thinking.

Take the example of physicist Richard Feynman, who won the Nobel Prize for a quantum physics study, and the starting point of this study was a casual observation in a restaurant. He noticed that the rotating plates would always sway slightly in the air, and he didn't understand why this was happening. This seemingly insignificant question ultimately led to important scientific discoveries.

Therefore, stay curious, explore bravely, and don’t underestimate the power of interdisciplinary thinking. Real innovation often comes from those who dare to ask questions and delve into their answers.

PA News : As a part-time DJ, do you still perform DJs frequently now? How to balance interest and work?

Gavin Wood: Currently, I have little time to do DJ. However, I hope to take some time to invest in it soon. But at present, my main energy is on JAM development, code writing, and the promotion of the Proof-of-Personhood project.

Still, I think it’s still very important to keep balance in life. I am grateful to spend some time with my family, and they understand that I need to travel, like this time I’m going to China for a tour. At the same time, I also think that artistic creation is a good way of self-expression. Mathematics and coding are also part of the art to some extent, but I do love music and hope to get more of my time back this year.