Across the time Rob Hadick signed the paperwork to affix Dragonfly Capital in April 2022, he’d additionally rented a home within the Hamptons. A contract along with his former employer, hedge fund GoldenTree, obliged him to chorus from working for six months, so Hadick ready to lean into compelled leisure time within the nation. His plans for a relaxed keep quickly got here undone.
Shortly after his arrival, the crypto market went into free fall following the implosion of a infamous stablecoin mission referred to as Terra Luna. Hadick remembers scrolling by way of Twitter because the contagion unfold. His spouse referred to as to ask if he was stress-free. “I don’t think you understand what’s happening to our net worth,” he responded. “I am drinking whiskey in a dark room at 2 p.m. on a Tuesday.”
His exile lastly resulted in November—simply in time for a second crypto calamity within the type of FTX’s collapse. However Hadick by no means rethought his resolution to go all in on crypto. “I was scared about what was happening to the industry,” he not too long ago advised Fortune from Dragonfly’s workplaces close to New York Metropolis’s Union Sq.. “But I was excited about the opportunity we had, because we [still] had $500 million to deploy.”
That fund, Dragonfly’s third, ended up catapulting the agency into the higher echelon of the crypto enterprise world, competing with the likes of Andreessen Horowitz and Paradigm because of its prescient bets on now large startups together with Polymarket, Rain, and Ethena. Now, as crypto enters yet one more winter, with token costs plummeting and pleasure washed out by AI hype, Dragonfly is saying its fourth fund, a $650 million car.
The crypto enterprise ecosystem goes by way of a “mass extinction event,” as Hadick put it, however Dragonfly has thrived regardless of a founder breakup, a regulatory scare from the Division of Justice, and a pivot away from China amid a crypto crackdown. On the core of Dragonfly’s technique are its 4 symbiotic leaders: Hadick, the fintech bridge; Haseeb Qureshi, the ambassador; Tom Schmidt, the DeFi whiz; and Bo Feng, the agency’s mysterious founder and an icon of the Chinese language tech scene. “It’s bizarre to see us now become one of the incumbents,” stated Qureshi. “We’re playing a bigger game than we were playing in the past.”
Origin story
Qureshi began enjoying poker professionally at age 16, largely sticking to on-line video games as a result of he wasn’t allowed in casinos. By the point he was 21, Qureshi had raked in virtually $2 million, however he realized that he didn’t wish to make the sport his life. He made a guess with a pal that if he ever performed one other hand {of professional} poker, Qureshi must pay him $100,000. “That was my way of sealing off the decision for myself,” he advised Fortune.
Qureshi says that his early years on the digital card desk ready him for a pivot into crypto investing. Simply as associates advised him he was loopy for changing into a teenage poker shark, his resolution to affix the crypto business elicited widespread doubt, not least as a result of Qureshi had made a reputation for himself as a Silicon Valley software program engineer. He left a profitable job at Airbnb to go launch a stablecoin startup in 2017, lengthy earlier than stablecoins had been all the trend, finally discovering his option to a (then) $500 million enterprise fund referred to as MetaStable.
Immediately, Qureshi is arguably the general public face of Dragonfly, because of his function on the favored Chopping Block podcast—the crypto model of All-In—and viral posts on Crypto Twitter concerning the failure of Web3 gaming or the efficacy of blockchain launches. However Qureshi didn’t begin at Dragonfly till a couple of months after it started, becoming a member of in 2019 because the crypto business was caught in one in all its common extended downturns.
That early Dragonfly is unrecognizable from its present kind. The agency started as a partnership between Alex Pack, a younger VC main crypto offers at Bain Capital Ventures, and Bo Feng, who had made his title as one of many high traders in China’s burgeoning web ecosystem. Feng, who declined to be interviewed for this story, is reported to have connections to China’s political elite, cast partially by his marriage to a granddaughter of Deng Xiaoping, who got here to energy after Mao Zedong’s loss of life.
By his agency Ceyuan Ventures, Feng had invested within the crypto alternate OKEx (later rebranded to OKX), which in 2018 was the biggest alternate on this planet. He joined forces with Pack to make bets each within the U.S. and Asia. Based on an early article in Bitcoin Journal, Dragonfly’s first $100 million fund was backed by among the largest names in Asian tech, together with Sequoia China’s Neil Shen. (Past Feng’s function as a bridge to the area’s monetary powerhouses, Qureshi described him as a “relationship savant,” although he retains a low public profile.)
Dragonfly constructed its fame with investments in crypto firms like alternate Bybit and monetary providers agency Matrixport, in addition to in different crypto enterprise corporations as a fund of funds. Based on Qureshi, when he got here on board, he introduced three situations: He needed to cease doing fund investments; he needed to steer extra offers; and he needed to construct out a technical staff. “Bo basically said yes to all three,” Qureshi stated. “In his words, he threw the car keys to me … and that was the birth of modern Dragonfly.” One in all Qureshi’s first strikes was to carry on Schmidt, then the pinnacle of product at a decentralized alternate referred to as 0x, as a junior investor. (Schmidt shortly rose the ranks to common accomplice.)
The break up between Pack, who went on to start out his personal enterprise agency, Hack VC, and Dragonfly is the stuff of crypto VC lore, although Qureshi downplays the drama. “It ultimately led to us just having totally different visions for what fund two and beyond was supposed to look like for Dragonfly,” he stated. Pack advised Fortune that his first fund with Feng was a “tremendous success,” however that he realized they had been “very different culturally.”
“I spent a few months helping to hire and train my replacements, and then we parted ways,” he stated. Schmidt used extra colourful language to explain Pack, attributing the schism to persona.
By 2020, when Pack left the agency, Dragonfly had larger issues. Largely owing to Feng, the agency had its back-office staff in Beijing. However the Chinese language authorities had begun to crack down on crypto, forcing Dragonfly to choose up its Asia operations and transfer to Singapore. Based on Schmidt, who speaks Chinese language and had chosen to intern at a Chinese language firm throughout school as an alternative of accepting an early supply from Coinbase, Dragonfly nonetheless maintains a powerful Asia presence, although its investments within the area have gone down over time. “You look at the user base of a lot of these chains and [decentralized exchanges], and they’re obviously very Asia-based,” he advised Fortune. “But in terms of new investment opportunities, there haven’t been as many as there used to be.”
Nonetheless, the agency’s presence within the U.S. crypto scene grew. There have been larger gamers elevating monster funds, together with Paradigm and Haun Ventures, which every had autos over $1 billion, in contrast with Dragonfly’s comparatively modest second fund of $225 million, closed in late 2020. Nonetheless, Dragonfly backed winners resembling layer-1 blockchain Avalanche and monetary providers agency Amber Group, in addition to an funding into the controversial privateness protocol Twister Money, which permits customers to anonymize crypto transactions. The latter landed Dragonfly in nationwide headlines in 2025 after prosecutors let slip that Schmidt would possibly face legal prices for the funding as a part of a broader money-laundering case. (The Division of Justice shortly backtracked, incomes the agency a badge of honor amongst crypto true believers, although Qureshi stated the funding was by no means ideological.)
Hadick’s arrival amid the existential collapse of FTX, nonetheless, catapulted Dragonfly to the subsequent echelon—and solidified the agency’s identification.
The brand new period
Throughout the crypto growth of 2021, entrepreneurs put forth lofty schemes to remake the web with decentralized plumbing. These included constructing would-be options to the likes of Twitter and Spotify. For crypto traders, these plans revolved round so-called token mechanisms, with enterprise corporations receiving rights to personal proprietary cryptocurrencies in lieu of conventional fairness stakes.
That Web3 imaginative and prescient of the longer term by no means absolutely performed out. Even earlier than the collapse of FTX, crypto was headed in a single course: Wall Avenue. Bitcoin had began out as a type of digital money, after which Ethereum constructed the subsequent layer by permitting builders to code decentralized monetary purposes for lending and buying and selling. However traders like Hadick, who got here from the world of conventional finance, believed that crypto would quickly swallow all the capabilities of banks and brokerage corporations. “We knew that that was the one place where we needed somebody who was deeper than we were,” Qureshi stated. “Rob was just the person that we all intellectually felt had the horsepower, the coverage, and the experience to play that role.”
When Hadick joined, Dragonfly started to make investments into the sorts of firms that now outline the crypto panorama. One, Ethena, was constructing an artificial greenback that generated yield by way of a sophisticated hedge-fund-like technique on the again finish. Although Ethena has since grow to be one of the vital distinguished initiatives within the crowded discipline of stablecoins, when founder Man Younger pitched the thought to traders, most of them dismissed the thought as “insane,” as he put it. The skeptics cited the Terra Luna debacle, which practically took down the complete crypto business after the algorithmic-backed stablecoin failed to keep up a $1 peg. “It’s actually offensive that you’re even saying this after what just happened,” Younger remembered traders telling him.
This was nonetheless the center of the bear market of 2023, and Dragonfly jumped on the alternative. “They were able to look at it from first principles,” Younger stated. The agency led Ethena’s $6 million seed spherical. Simply over a yr in the past, Ethena raised a $100 million spherical, with traders together with Franklin Templeton and Constancy’s enterprise arm. Immediately, its flagship stablecoin has a market capitalization of round $6.3 billion.
The following yr, Dragonfly backed the Sequence B funding spherical for Polymarket, which the agency had virtually invested in years earlier than. Based on Qureshi, Dragonfly was practically the primary investor into Polymarket’s seed spherical again in 2020, when Shayne Coplan was putting out with many of the VCs he was pitching. “We really loved him,” Qureshi stated, though prediction markets hadn’t but proved profitable on the time. Polychain ended up providing a greater time period sheet, which Dragonfly determined to not match. “It was obviously a massive miss on our part, but we had the right idea,” Qureshi stated.
The remainder of the crypto business finally got here on board with the concept that essentially the most profitable digital asset firms wouldn’t be blockchain-based cell video games, however comparatively boring variations of economic merchandise like bank cards and money-market funds. Even Chris Dixon, the a16z accomplice who championed the Web3 ideas of “read write own,” not too long ago wrote a put up on X arguing that we at the moment are within the “financial era of blockchains.”
“This is the biggest meta shift I can feel in my entire time in the industry,” Schmidt stated, including that traders are realizing there shall be fewer native tokens for various crypto protocols, and extra tokens that signify an actual world asset like shares and personal credit score funds. “A lot of crypto funds are now saying, ‘Hey, we’re fintech funds,’” Hadick stated. “Which is what I think we do better than anybody.”
The growing integration of blockchain and the finance business raises uncomfortable questions of whether or not crypto is betraying its founding beliefs, which noticed Bitcoin as a rebel towards massive banks and authorities management of the monetary system.
“I do always try not to lose sight of the bigger picture, which is we made this digital internet money [go] from zero to a trillion dollars in 10 years,” stated Schmidt. “The job is obviously not done, and if anything, when I look globally, I think that the need for this stuff is more in demand than ever.”
Practically 4 years after Hadick joined, the crypto enterprise sector is caught in one other identification disaster, with offers falling and funds struggling to steer backers to refill their coffers. However with its recent warfare chest, Dragonfly is able to form the subsequent blockchain period. “We talk out loud, and we say what we think,” stated Qureshi. “In a space that is just completely flooded with bullshit and with fakers and self-promoters, I think that has actually been a superpower.”
