When Gavin Wood co-founded Ethereum, he stated that it would “allow people to interact in mutually beneficial ways without anyone needing to trust each other.” In theory, such a platform would pave the way for Web3, characterized by decentralized or distributed network architectures, that would lay the groundwork for a truly open internet where we would not have to blindly entrust our data to monopolistic corporations or get permission from them in order to participate.
Since its inception in 2015, however, Ethereum has simply failed to adapt fast enough and keep up with the pace. Transactions costs for decentralized applications (DApps) have been too high while transaction speeds have been too slow. Wood left the Ethereum team in 2016 and founded the framework for a decentralized Web3: Polkadot.