Polkadot was founded by Dr. Gavin Wood, Robert Habermeier, and Peter Czaban as the flagship protocol of Web3 Foundation, a Swiss nonprofit dedicated to building the decentralized web. Gavin Wood is the most prominent among them as Ethereum co-founder, Parity Technologies founder, and creator of the Solidity programming language, also credited with coining the term Web3. Habermeier is a Thiel Fellow and cryptography researcher, while Czaban formerly served as Web3 Foundation technology director.