I'm Gavin Wood, the founder of Polkadot. This issue is to act as a historical record for the initial VII Dan rank.

My contributions to Polkadot begin in 2016 with its inception and high-level design, eventually published in the Polkadot white paper. I have had Polkadot as my primary concern for 6 years.

I have been involved with the design of most important elements of Polkadot at some level throughout their history, many quite heavily. I played the sole or primary role in designing: Substrate Metaprotocol Architecture (on-chain upgrades, split host/runtime, Relay/para abstraction), FRAME & associated conventions, many core pallets, FRAME benchmarking, Polkadot governance v1 (conviction voting, Council, TC, Democracy pallets), XCM, Polkadot governance v2 (Fellowship, Referenda, curves), FRAME assets. I have written about many of these on my blog.

My code contributions can be viewed for each of Substrate, Polkadot, Cumulus, SCALE, Environmental, Merkle Trie, XCM Format.

Example: