This week on Coffee with Calyptus, we sit down with Welly Sculley, a seasoned builder at the intersection of blockchain, emerging markets, and AI. From pioneering blockchain payments at Ripple to driving Web3 consumer adoption at Superlayer, Welly shares insights on what makes blockchain inevitable, the key to meaningful partnerships, and the role of AI in shaping the future of Web3.
You’ve been part of some incredible shifts in tech, from blockchain payments at Ripple to Web3 consumer venture building at Superlayer to capital markets at The Markets Group. What keeps you so excited about being at the intersection of markets, emerging ecosystems, and blockchain?
I get excited by the idea of turning science fiction into reality. Before I started working in the crypto industry in 2013, I was in digital payments, and could see plenty of reasons for and against blockchain being the future of finance.
The most powerful reason to join was the sense that blockchain was weird, powerful, and inevitable. Very much like pre-AOL Internet or pre-ChatGPT AI - it was still very new and rough, but you could see how it could become transformative. Specifically, I remember discussing the prospects for blockchain with the Ripple founders during my interviews, and realizing this company was actually using tech that I had read about in a book (Cryptonomicon) years earlier. It felt like stepping into a sci-fi novel.
The core concept of blockchain hasn’t changed substantially in the last decade, but the ecosystem has evolved into something far bigger and more complex than I ever expected when I entered the space.
Partnerships seem to be your superpower. What’s the secret to forging meaningful collaborations in Web3?
One of the biggest misconceptions about web3 is that success is all marketing and narrative. That if you have the right story, high-profile investors, and KOLs, you’re going to outperform.
The reality is that the biggest successes are highly focused on product and finding product-market fit, and the secret to getting there is understanding who your customer is, and why they’re going to want the thing you’re building.
The same is true for partnerships, which are about combining your thing with a partner’s thing to engineer an even better experience for a customer you both care about.
Superlayer is aiming to enable mass-market adoption of Web3 through consumer applications. What do you see as the biggest challenge in convincing traditional consumer brands to embrace blockchain?
It’s time and patience. I like to think of myself as an early adopter of new tech - especially consumer apps - and go out of my way to try new things to understand why other people find them exciting, even when I don’t. Most people don’t do this, and consumer brands generally serve the market of ‘most people,’ which makes adoption challenging.
Although innovation in product and marketing plays a role in driving adoption, I think you have to attribute a big part of it to giving enough people enough time to get comfortable with new technologies, and find their way into it. You don’t want to force anyone, including brands, to adopt too early.
To move things faster, identify corporations that genuinely have a culture of leaning into new technologies, including the will to make change if the tech is promising.
From building banking networks to creating gaming ecosystems, you’ve seen it all. If you could go back in time and give your younger self one piece of advice at Ripple, what would it be—and why?
One of my biggest misses later in my Ripple career was failing to appreciate how quickly the market of crypto-native consumers and businesses would grow.
If I had to give myself one piece of advice then - and to remind myself today - it would be to not take new markets for granted, and stay open-minded. Even if you don’t fully understand why someone is excited about something, it’s important to recognize the excitement, assume it exists for a legitimate reason, and talk with those people to understand where it comes from.
In the early days of Ripple, I was that excited person, and faced rejection - from banks, central banks, payment networks, etc. - more times than I would like to remember. But a few people who were open-minded ended up becoming extraordinary partners and great friends.
AI is becoming increasingly integrated into gaming and blockchain solutions. How do you see AI shaping the future of Web3 consumer, and are there specific ways Superlayer is leveraging this technology to innovate?
I can’t share specifics about what we’re doing behind the scenes, but can say that it’s a priority.
Looking at the rest of the industry, it’s clear that AI is already making a huge impact on web3 products and markets.
When it comes to web3 consumer, I think one of the most important areas to focus on is bots and sybil networks, which have extracted billions of dollars from legitimate web3 projects and users for years. I’m concerned about AI’s ability to make bots even effective at fraud. On the other hand, I’m excited to see how AI can help to protect web3 and allow it to thrive.
Solidity Challenge 🕵️♂️
What's wrong with these set of smart contracts?
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Solidity Challenge Answer ✅
Answer: Attacker can hijack the contract by exploiting delegatecall.
