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Matt Haldane

A decade after launching the Ethereum blockchain, co-founder Gavin Wood is keeping his vision for a Web3 beyond cryptocurrency and a truly decentralised internet alive through Polkadot.
At the Polkadot Jam Tour, during which Wood met Polkadot blockchain developers around the world and spoke of his vision for updates to the protocol, the Web3 architect held a presentation in Hong Kong just ahead of Consensus, the crypto conference that organiser CoinDesk held in the city for the first time this year.
Wood’s main focus these days is Polkadot, a blockchain network that is improving scalability and throughput with updated architecture. At Jam, he spoke for more than an hour about technical upgrades that would allow people to run more standard computer software directly on the blockchain.
Traditional financial use cases – something Hong Kong has been increasingly focused on – are not that interesting to the man who helped put automated transactions through smart contracts on the blockchain.
“As Web3 becomes a more accepted part of the scenery that banks operate in, that regulators operate in, we will probably see increased integration [with financial systems],” Wood told the Post after his Jam Tour speech at Cyberport on February 17. “Tentatively speaking, we may be on a path to the integration of more legitimate Web3 technologies than the sorts of things that we were seeing 10 years ago with banks taking up permissed ledgers.”
“I think there’s a lot of interesting use cases for Web3, and I think stablecoins are actually one of the less interesting ones,” he added.
Wood does not see efforts to create a “Web3 hub” as completely in line with how many blockchain projects like Polkadot are managed, which is often through so-called decentralised autonomous organisations – known as DAOs – made up of people scattered across the globe.

“I think [hubs] are more limited than in other industries or sectors, primarily because blockchain is a very internet-native technology and just naturally quite decentralised,” Wood said. “I think to some extent the collaborations between the different projects can also be internet-native … Maybe there is still some sort of good reason for having at least points where the people behind the projects actually get together … it’s just a bit less than usual.”
Polkadot has developer hubs around the world, including in Hong Kong. Max Rebol, co-founder and managing partner of the Polkadot-focused investment firm Harbour Industrial Capital, serves as the head Polkadot ambassador in Hong Kong, where he supports local Web3 events and organises monthly meetings through a group called PolkaPort East.
“Polkadot history is very much intertwined with Asia,” Rebol said, adding that many of the buyers in the first sale of the Dot crypto token came from China and Japan.
Like many blockchain projects, Polkadot also has a big developer community in mainland China, according to Rebol, with the main groups being Shenzhen-based OneBlock+ and Hangzhou-based Polkaworld. Since cryptocurrency is restricted on the mainland, Rebol said the developers tend to hold more events and are more public in Hong Kong.
While Polkadot does have its native Dot token, Wood’s focus these days appears to be more on building out his vision for Web3 and running decentralised applications at scale.
Rebol highlighted a number of projects that are building on Polkadot, such as Mythic Games, which got the rights to build a Fifa game called Fifa Rivals, which will let people collect and trade football players via blockchain.
Another project, called Mandalachain, aims to bring public services to the blockchain in Indonesia.
Despite some of the controversy around cryptocurrencies amid the rise of scams and ransomware, Wood takes a broader and more flexible view of Web3, a term he coined, and boils it down to expectations.
“Web3 is about building systems that do what they say on the tin,” Wood said.
The ability to revert funds in the case of fraud or abuse, for example, could be consistent with Web3, as long as users expect that funds could be yanked back based on how the system works, according to Wood.
“This is one of the very important problems that Web3 is trying to solve,” he said. “It’s the question of systems mutating to the point where they do not represent the expectations of their users.”
Wood makes it clear that he wants systems that people trust, something that he suggests is being challenged in current political environments. He brought up the issue of privacy and identity as one thing Web3 can solve, saying people are “not super keen on handing over their passport in order to prove that they’re a person”.
“There are Web3 ways of solving this, and they solve it a lot better than putting the keys in the hands of some unelected central authority who we just have to trust will do the right thing,” Wood said. “With the current global political turmoil that we are increasingly finding ourselves in, I think Web2 systems are going to be tested heavily.”
“I wouldn’t be in this ecosystem for 11 years if I didn’t think that what we’re building is quite a lot better, is categorically more reliable, more robust, more resilient,” he added.


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Wood’s newer project Polkadot is focused on scaling decentralised applications, with many developers coming from China


Wood’s newer project Polkadot is focused on scaling decentralised applications, with many developers coming from China.


Ethereum co-founder Gavin Wood says Web3 is on track as finance firms move in

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}Wood’s newer project Polkadot is focused on scaling decentralised applications, with many developers coming from China

Wood’s newer project Polkadot is focused on scaling decentralised applications, with many developers coming from China