Polkadot is the work of Dr. Gavin Wood — a British programmer, Ethereum co-founder, and former CTO, who authored the Ethereum Yellow Paper (the technical specification), created the Solidity language, and coined the term “Web3” in 2014. In 2016, he left Ethereum and founded Ethcore (later renamed Parity Technologies), then authored the Polkadot whitepaper — a “heterogeneous multi-chain” concept, an “Internet of Blockchains.”
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Team members included Robert Habermeier (a distributed systems/cryptography expert) and Peter Czaban (Technology Director at the Web3 Foundation).
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2017: Wood founds the Switzerland-based, non-profit Web3 Foundation to support the project; that same year, a token sale (ICO) raises roughly $140–144 million.
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2019: Kusama launches, Polkadot's “canary network” — testing governance and upgrades in a live environment before they reach the main network.
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May 2020: Polkadot mainnet launches (initially in a Proof-of-Authority phase, overseen by the Web3 Foundation); June 2020: governance transfers to DOT holders, completing decentralization; August 2020: a 100x token redenomination.
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October 2022: Wood steps down as CEO of Parity Technologies (“The role of CEO has never been one which I have coveted,” he wrote at the time); August 2025: he announces his return as Parity's CEO.
The Substrate framework lets developers connect their own blockchain (a “parachain”) to Polkadot*'*s relay chain instead of building from scratch, gaining shared security and consensus in return.