CEO and cofounder of Parity Technologies Jutta Steiner has left the company. Parity was the tech company developing the much-anticipated Polkadot (DOT/USD) blockchain network, CoinDesk reported. A representative of Parity stated Steiner had stepped down earlier this year. She had been at the fore of Parity since 2015.
Gavin Wood takes over as CEO
Gavin Wood, a cofounder of Ethereum (ETH/USD) who helped develop the smart contract programming language Solidity, will take over from Steiner. Steiner, who helped create Polkadot, was responsible for Ethereum network security between 2014 and 2016.
Polkadot blockchain to go live on December 17
Polkadot is on the brink of launching the first series of projects to win slots on its interoperable parachain network, scheduled to go live on December 17. The first Polkadot parachain auction gave Gavin Wood a reason to celebrate the newfound freedom from Ethereum smart contracts’ economic constraints.
Users don’t need to buy or know anything about DOT
According to Wood, Polkadot’s economic lease-holding parachain model does away with the need to buy or even know anything about DOT, the native token of Polkadot. This model is vastly different from not only Ethereum, but also most of its competitors. Wood told CoinDesk in an interview:
The users of applications that are built on Ethereum are enslaved to it in an economic sense. These users have to own ether on Ethereum and oftentimes some other token that allows them to use whatever application that is built using Ethereum smart contracts. This is a huge limitation.
He drew an analogy with Google, saying it wouldn’t make sense to pay Google a tenth of a cent for electricity every time you did a Google search.
