Gavin Wood Announces 'Impending Release' of DIY Blockchain Tool

Speaking at the Web3 Summit in Berlin Tuesday, ethereum co-founder and Parity Technologies founder Gavin Wood announced that his company's new tool, Substrate, is weeks from release.

Describing the Substrate tool in more detail, Wood said that it provides an entirely general purpose platform for blockchain development.

"Substrate is much more general than ethereum," Wood said, adding: "We really wanted to make something pure and general."

While Substrate is already actionable, Wood emphasized that work remains prior to its public release, namely as it relates to developer documentation, as well as "Rounding some corners and removing any sharp edges."

At the conference, Wood also announced that the Substrate software will be relicensed to Apache 2, a more permissive, business-friendly license than its current, the GPL3. According to the Wood, the new license, "Instantly opens the door to all of the Fortune 500 to actually experiment with it."

On top of that, Wood also presented a new Polkadot design that, in his words, allows for "Infinite scalability." This entails a tree-type structure of Polkadot chains running on Polkadot chains, something "Cyclical and self-referential, what mathematicians call composability," he said.

Wood continued, "[It's] a hierarchy of chains and the reason that it's possible is that Polkadot can host itself, and every time you go down a level you can scale up 100 times.

Together with Polkadot - that is targeted for release in Q3 2019 - Wood said today's Substrate release paves the way for blockchain networks of all kinds to coexist.

Speaking to Substrate specifically, Wood emphasized that it was different from ethereum in its upgradeability.

This will likely be attractive to many since as Wood put it, hard forks can be a "Nightmare." Because getting all the different stakeholders on board with new changes has proved difficult for many blockchain projects in the past, Wood contended that the long-term debates this arouses makes blockchains less able to keep up with technological developments.