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<h1>About the Authors</h1>

<p><strong>Andreas M. Antonopoulos</strong> is a critically acclaimed best-selling author, speaker, and educator, and one of the world’s foremost Bitcoin and open blockchain experts. Andreas makes complex subjects accessible and easy to understand. He is known for delivering electric talks that combine economics, psychology, technology, and game theory with current events, personal anecdotes, and historical precedent—effortlessly transliterating the complex issues of blockchain technology out of the abstract and into the real world.</p>

<p>In 2014, Andreas authored the groundbreaking book <em>Mastering Bitcoin</em> (O’Reilly Media), widely considered to be the best technical guide ever written about the technology. His second book, <em>The Internet of Money</em> (Merkle Bloom LLC)—which explains the technology’s potential impacts on human civilization—is a bestseller on Amazon. The much-anticipated second volume of <em>The Internet of Money</em> was released in fall 2017 and sold thousands of copies in the first month alone. <em>Mastering Ethereum</em> is his fourth book.</p>


<p><strong>Gavin Wood</strong> has a lifelong interest in the intersection of game theory, society, and technology. Having become an enthusiast of computers and programming at the age of 9, he went on to become a "bedroom coder," collaborating with friends from school to produce some well-received computer games in the Commodore Amiga era. He studied at the Royal Grammer School in Lancaster, UK, and later spent seven years at the University of York where he completed a PhD in computer science, specializing in neural networks and signal analysis for music visualization. During this time he became a prolific open source coder, leading and contributing to various projects including parts of KDE.</p>

<p>After leaving university he worked for a childhood hero in the games industry to create a cross-platform high-performance audio engine before moving on to occasional freelance work for Microsoft Research in the domain of embedded C++ domain-specific languages. In his time away from professional work he was a schoolteacher, helping with maths, art, and English; he also designed and published (together with Aeron Buchanan) a board game called "Milton Keynes" and did personal research into voting systems and advanced programming tools, culminating in creating the first C++ language workbench. Two startups later, a mutual friend made the introduction to Vitalik Buterin (the author of the first Ethereum whitepaper) in late 2013, and a month or so later Gavin, Vitalik, and the other six "cofounders" founded Ethereum.</p>

<p>Gavin coded the first functional implementation of Ethereum, "PoC-1," having implemented it in a few weeks. He quickly became Ethereum's CTO and effective platform architect, building upon Vitalik's original idea for a version of Bitcoin that had storage and flexible scripting. He coined the terms "EVM,&#x201d; &#x201c;PoA,&#x201d; and "Web 3.0," with the latter being his forward-looking idea for the decentralized web platform. He devised the Solidity contract language and wrote the Yellow Paper, the first formal specification of any blockchain protocol and one of the key ways Ethereum distinguishes itself from other blockchains.</p>

<p>In the months after Ethereum launched, Gavin left his position as CTO of the Ethereum Foundation with several others and founded Parity Technologies, a venture-backed firm set up to continue building out his original Ethereum vision. He now also serves as the founder and president of the Web3 Foundation and is currently focused on Polkadot, a next-generation blockchain intended to provide a platform for future innovations in the space.</p>

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