Julian Stafford

Julian Stafford is an entrepreneur based in Dubai and Sydney and the Co-Founder and CEO of Surgence Labs. He started Surgence in 2022. Today it is a Web3 go-to-market studio headquartered in Dubai: one embedded team runs creators and KOLs, community, content, search and paid media for funded crypto teams, and reports every week on TVL, volume, wallets and funded users. Surgence has worked with more than 200 clients, among them Binance, Bybit, ADI Foundation, Lotte and LINE FRIENDS, and its clients have generated more than $300M in revenue.

Julian also launched TraderComps, a calendar of every trading competition, points season and prize pool across crypto and traditional trading venues. Surgence Labs also built OnchainSuite, its on-chain retention platform.

Before Surgence, Julian was an early employee at Neara, the Australian AI company that builds digital twins of electricity networks and passed a $1B valuation in 2026. From 2019 to 2023 he worked there in business development, then as a product manager in Sydney and a product owner in the San Francisco Bay Area. Earlier he worked at Deloitte in Sydney in technology, strategy and transformation, and at Fiserv as an analyst. He studied at UNSW Sydney.

He started in Web3 as an anonymous account on X called Ruthless. When he began working with crypto and AI companies, the name became Ruthy, and later he put his real name on the account. People still call him Ruthy, and ruthybuilds is where he builds in public.

Julian has spoken at the Balkans Blockchain Summit 2026 in Prishtina, been featured by Business Magazine UAE, and been a guest on podcasts including Blockstars Web3 Weekly, the Future Leaders Podcast and xraised. He holds equity in Neara and in Hub, a Y Combinator company. See press and podcasts.