Web3 Leader Spotlight: Aidan Neil
This week, we sat down with Aidan Neil, CEO of Ladder Labs Inc., a select team of innovators at the forefront of autonomous systems. Ladder Labs is behind the first fully on-chain game on Solana.
Aidan is committed to developing fully on-chain products across gaming, engagement, and adtech. Feel free to follow him on X at @themoonboots.
What attracted you to building in Web3 after having previously worked for your government?
Firstly, it was the idea of cofounding with my cousin, Calvin. We’d always speculated on the advancements of Web3 enabling a brighter future of banking, regulation and governance, but when we started really applying a first principles lens to marketing, ads and affiliate networks, we could see a great potentially untapped market vertical propelled by the adoption of the technology. Payments built in, composability at the base layer, and transparency were ripe for supporting a new system.
Then we found Solana in 2020, and it finally all fell into place.
How is Ladder Labs pioneering the future of autonomous systems, particularly in the gaming industry?
Our company is the dev studio behind Laddercaster.com, the first fully on-chain game on Solana, as well as Buddy.link, Solana’s web3 marketing stack, underpinned by our fully on-chain engagement and attribution protocol.
Both products share a similar premise: build the whole stack. Autonomous systems, particularly ones that can support applications, require a foundational protocol that is powerful yet lightweight, tooling to built with, and applications at the top that utilize the stack to its fullest. We aim to continue building the protocols that power the gamification of all products, end-to-end.
What characteristics must a gaming project have in order to survive any bear cycle in the Web3 space?
Games are the most difficult products to build, and true Web3 games are 10-100x more difficult. Projects that had a strong, evangelized community, and business/economic models that had a higher ratio of pay to play and play to earn users are what withstood the bear.
There are so many components to consider, and doubling down on a project’s strengths, be it community, product, or token, is what kept those teams alive.
What advice would you give to new builders entering the Web3 space?
No one does it alone. So often are founders portrayed as lone wolves, hellbent on proving everyone wrong. It’s exhausting and nearly impossible to push through adversities, failures, and noise on your own. Find a strong co-founder.
