After a 40-minute delay, Gavin Wood finally stepped on stage.
He greeted the hundred or so Polkadot faithful in a former East German radio broadcast station turned high-end events space.
Then, the crypto mogul began typing feverishly on his laptop.
His audience was finally going to get a sneak peek into Wood’s latest tech showcase for his prized blockchain on Wednesday at this year’s Web3 Summit in Berlin.
Projected onto the screen behind him, a half dozen terminals and windows showed strings of code, bright yellow and green lines, and one large screen that resembled a blue and red chessboard.
“That pattern basically comes from this code,” Wood said, pointing out the chequered design on screen. “It’s flipping between zero and one, zero being reddish, and one being blueish.”
The audience waited with bated breath.
Wearing a splotchy, sleeveless black shirt, three-quarter-length harem pants, and designer boots, Wood continued to clack away.
“Now, let’s see if it’s understood what we said,” he said after giving the machine another order.
Suddenly, the chequered pattern began scrolling downwards in an infinite loop.
Baffled, amazed, but most likely deeply confused, the audience applauded as the billionaire walked off the stage.
Welcome to the Gavin Wood Show.
Spinning tracks
The 45-year-old British computer scientist has always had a penchant for theatrics.
After a five-week-long developer boot camp in Hong Kong last year, Wood, under his stage name DJ Wasabi, surprised weary programmers by spinning tracks from the Gorillaz, Franz Ferdinand, and the French electronic artist NTO.
Other times, his appearances have bordered on the strange.
In 2024, a YouTube video showed a shirtless Wood explaining the intricacies of zero-knowledge cryptography by candlelight. Another showed him lying in bed and describing the Polkadot network as a giant pancake-making machine.
On Wednesday, though, the quirky founder’s objective was clear: breathe new life into the struggling, five-year-old blockchain.
Over more than two hours, Wood outlined how the network’s treasury should tighten its purse strings, teased the upcoming launch of a native stablecoin for the network, and unveiled renovations to a 19th-century palace near Lisbon for Polkadot’s Outpost programme.
He also updated the audience on delivering the network’s latest upgrade, called the Join-Accumulate Machine (JAM), the viability of zero-knowledge technology for the network, and renovating the wider network’s governance arrangement among validators and users.
It’s an ambitious revision for the $6.5 billion crypto network. But whether such changes are enough to turn things around remains to be seen.
After all, Wood’s creation has long played second fiddle to competitors.
Polkadot’s native cryptocurrency, DOT, has declined by more than 33% over the last 12 months, according to CoinGecko.
Meanwhile, the token powering Cardano, the blockchain network launched by his good friend and fellow Ethereum co-founder Charles Hoskinson, has soared more than 86% over the same period.
Even Ethereum, the year’s underperformer, has scraped together a 3% gain, after recovering from a prolonged slump.
And across a dozen of Polkadot’s so-called parachains – subsidiary networks that use the same code as Polkadot – there’s less than $400 million sloshing around.
Cardano’s DeFi stats aren’t much better, boasting nearly $500 million across its under 40 different apps, according to DefiLlama.
Meanwhile, Ethereum commands more than 60% of the $314 billion DeFi market. The blockchain has also attracted significant interest from Wall Street, including new custody offerings from BNY Mellon and a host of public companies purchasing millions of Ether.
Catching Ethereum is perhaps out of the question. But that doesn’t mean Polkadot is standing still.
Wood explained that staking costs for the network were dragging Polkadot and proposed serious cost-cutting measures to shore up its financial health.
Headline figure
Proof-of-stake is a mechanism by which users put up a certain amount of cryptocurrency to run nodes or validators that verify transactions on a network. For this, they earn staking rewards that cost the network.
On Polkadot, it’s a lot, according to Wood.
‘Here’s the headline figure: $500 million. This is about the annual spend for Polkadot’s security.’
Gavin Wood
As this spend is denominated in DOT, Wood posits that users running nodes are effectively selling the token all the time to cover expenses such as rent, food, hardware maintenance, and taxes.
The fix? Pay validators a fixed cost, and pay it out in cash.
“This is my proposal to get costs down from half a billion to a little over $100 million,” he said.
Which brought the founder to his next big idea.
“There is a lot to be gained from creating a native stablecoin on Polkadot,” he said. “That means we can pay fiat, but not have quite the same cost to the DOT ecosystem.”
Treasury proposal
He added that the stablecoin would be decentralised and indicated that DOT would be used as collateral to back the stablecoin.
He declined to reveal when the stablecoin would launch and indicated that a treasury proposal for the Polkadot ecosystem would soon be presented to hammer out the details.
Cost-cutting measures and product launches, however, paled in comparison to Wood’s ambitions to establish splashy locations that would bring the Polkadot community together.
And to share the latest acquisition, Wood handed off the mic to one of the creative directors behind The Emergent College in Lisbon, named Sasha.
Sprawling villa
On the big screen, a sprawling villa with a terracotta roof appeared high in the Portuguese mountains, surrounded by a vast expanse of symmetrical, hedged gardens.
Sasha explained how, over the last three years, he and 20 other architects had renovated the palace to a multi-functional space for conferences, hackathons, music, and art residencies.
The team is developing a permaculture garden to serve in the communal kitchen, a recording studio for musicians, and an underground vinyl bar complete with a record collection supplied primarily by Wood.
The facility also features a 100-square-meter pool, complete with a sauna and steam room.
The topper: a large, circular room filled with silk sheets and pillows.
Sasha indicated that the room would serve as a ritual space for guests to lie down and listen to longer albums or enjoy live musical performances.
See you in the Womb Room. pic.twitter.com/zRh4koMaZn
— Jay Chrawnna (@GldnCalf) July 16, 2025
He was quick to point out that this particular space was Wood’s idea.
“Gavin came up with this idea a few years ago,” he said. “It should feel like you’re going into the womb.”
For Wood, the idea has been on the back burner for some time.
But that’s changing, along with the Polkadot founder’s primary focus.
“They’re starting to come to fruition,” he told the audience.
“As they do, I’m pivoting my focus to the idea of bringing web3 into the meatspace.”
Liam Kelly is a Berlin-based reporter for DL News. Got a tip? Email him at [email protected].
