Polkadot was created by the Web3 Foundation, which is an open-source project. Its founders are Gavin Wood, Robert Habermeier and Peter Czaban. Notably, Gavin Wood is also one of the co-founders of Ethereum and created the smart contract coding language used on the Ethereum platform — Solidity. The team started Polkadot as a competing layer 1 blockchain to overcome some of Ethereum’s limitations, specifically scalability and interoperability.