Gavin Wood’s biggest hope: Free crypto transactions and Web3 tech worldwide

We need to “divorce Ethereum from Ether” to onboard the six billion Web2 users, Wood told Cointelegraph during an exclusive.

Gavin Wood’s biggest hope is making Web3 technology and cryptocurrency a socially beneficial public good.

For Web3 to fulfill its true purpose, cryptocurrency transactions should become free of transaction fees, according to Gavin Wood, the co-founder of Ethereum, Polkadot, and Kusama.

Speaking exclusively to Cointelegraph, Wood said:

“My biggest hope is that we can really make [Web3] free for everyone.”

Wood’s upcoming tattoo-based Web3 individuality solution, Proof-of-Ink, is a significant part of his efforts to make crypto and Web3 free to use worldwide.

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Vitalik and Wood wanted to remove Ether from the Ethereum ecosystem

In a surprising development for crypto investors, Wood and Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin initially wanted to get rid of the Ether (ETH) token.

The two core Ethereum founders were initially exploring an Ether-less Ethereum ecosystem back in 2013, Wood told Cointelegraph:

“Vitalik and I were talking about the possibility of basically getting rid of Ether, the currency. Something that now appears to be unthinkable.”

Gavin Wood, interview with Cointelegraph’s Zoltan Vardai. Source: YouTube

Vitalik and Wood finally decided to keep Ether as an efficient anti-spam mechanism as well as a means of raising funds for further innovation.

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We need to “divorce Ethereum from Ether”

Despite Ether being the second-largest cryptocurrency, developers will need to divorce it from the Ethereum network.

This difficult feat is necessary to onboard the six billion Web2 users to the Web3 space, explained Wood:

“It will be hard to divorce Ethereum from Ether in an effective way that makes it sufficiently responsive to the sort of applications that we will need to produce and deploy on Web3 to bring over the 6 billion people using Web2 services daily.”

Gavin Wood, interview with Cointelegraph’s Zoltan Vardai. Source: YouTube

Polkadot’s JAM chain is making strides toward free cryptocurrency transactions, which is Wood’s guiding star for Web3, explained Wood:

Jam achieves this by making blockchain transaction fees nearly free, but a more permanent solution will be Web3 individuality — which removes the need for an anti-spam mechanism and hence transaction fees.

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