Written by:Leo Schwartz, Fortune Magazine
Translated by: Yangz, Techub News
When Rob Hadick signed the documents to join Dragonfly Capital in April 2022, he was still renting a house in the Hamptons. Due to a non-compete agreement with his former employer, hedge fund GoldenTree, he was not allowed to work in a similar job for six months. Hadick had planned to enjoy life during this mandatory sabbatical, but his leisurely vacation plans quickly fell apart.
Shortly after his arrival, the notorious stablecoin project Terra Luna collapsed, causing a crash in the cryptocurrency market. Hadick remembers scrolling through Twitter as the crisis unfolded. His wife called to ask if he was relaxing. He replied, "You might not really understand what our net worth is going through," "At 2 PM on Tuesday, I was sitting in a small dark room drinking whiskey."
To make matters worse, just when his "exile period" finally ended in November, he faced the second crypto disaster: the collapse of FTX. But Hadick never regretted his decision to dive headfirst into the crypto industry. "The things that were happening in the industry scared me at the time," he said recently in Dragonfly’s office near Union Square in New York. "But I was excited about the opportunities we had because we still had $500 million to invest."
It was this third fund that propelled Dragonfly to the top tier of crypto venture capital, on par with firms like Andreessen Horowitz and Paradigm. This was thanks to their precise bets on now-thriving startups like Polymarket, Rain, and Ethena. Now, as token prices plummet and market enthusiasm is dampened by the AI craze, cryptocurrency has entered another winter, and Dragonfly announced the launch of its fourth fund, reaching $650 million.
As Hadick said, the crypto venture capital ecosystem is undergoing a "great extinction event," yet Dragonfly has withstood the challenges of a founder split, regulatory panic from the U.S. Department of Justice, and the withdrawal from the Chinese market amid China's crackdown on cryptocurrencies, and has instead thrived. The core of Dragonfly's strategy is its four complementary leaders: Hadick, with a fintech background, serves as a bridge; Haseeb Qureshi is the public face; DeFi prodigy Tom Schmidt; and the company's enigmatic founder, iconic figure in the Chinese tech scene Feng Bo. "It's amazing to see that we have become one of the established players," Qureshi said. "We are playing a bigger game than ever before."
Origin Story
Qureshi started playing professional poker at the age of 16 because he couldn't get into casinos, mainly playing online. By the age of 21, Qureshi had already earned nearly $2 million, but he realized he did not want to make a living playing cards. He made a bet with a friend: if he played one more hand of professional poker, he would pay his friend $100,000. "That was my way of completely putting an end to that idea," he told Fortune.
Qureshi said that his early experiences at online poker tables prepared him for his later shift to crypto investing. Just as friends thought it was crazy for him to become a professional poker player at a young age, his decision to enter the crypto industry also raised widespread skepticism, especially because Qureshi was previously becoming well-known in Silicon Valley as a software engineer. In 2017, he quit his high-paying job at Airbnb to start a stablecoin startup—long before stablecoins became popular—and later joined the then $500 million venture capital fund MetaStable.
Today, Qureshi can be considered the public face of Dragonfly, thanks to his appearances on the popular podcast Chopping Block (the crypto version of All-In) and his viral posts on Crypto Twitter about the failures of Web3 games or the validity of launching blockchain projects. However, Qureshi did not join Dragonfly right at its inception; he came on board in 2019 when the crypto industry was deep in a cyclical long slump.
The early Dragonfly is completely different from now. The company was originally co-founded by Alex Pack and Feng Bo. Pack was a young venture capitalist at Bain Capital Ventures responsible for cryptocurrency investing; Feng Bo was a prominent figure in China's thriving internet ecosystem, known as one of the top investors.
Through his fund, Feng Bo invested in cryptocurrency exchange OKEx (later renamed OKX), which was the world's largest exchange in 2018. He teamed up with Pack to make simultaneous bets in both the U.S. and Asia. According to an early article by Bitcoin Magazine, Dragonfly's first $100 million fund received support from some of the loudest names in the Asian tech scene, including Shen Nanpeng from Sequoia China. (In addition to being a bridge connecting the region's financial giants, Qureshi describes Feng Bo as a "master of relationships," even though he remains low-key in public.)
Dragonfly gradually established its reputation by investing in crypto companies like Bybit and Matrixport and investing in other crypto venture capital funds as a fund-of-funds. According to Qureshi, when he joined, he proposed three conditions: to stop investing through the fund-of-funds, to take more lead on deals, and to build a tech team. "Feng Bo basically agreed to all of it," Qureshi said. "In his words, he 'threw me the car keys'... this is the birth of modern Dragonfly." One of Qureshi’s early moves was recruiting Schmidt, who was then the product lead at decentralized exchange 0x, to become a junior investor. (Schmidt quickly rose to managing partner.)
Later, Alex Pack left Dragonfly and founded another venture capital firm called Hack VC; his split with Dragonfly is considered a legendary story in the crypto venture capital circle, but Qureshi downplays the drama. "At the end of the day, we had completely different visions for Dragonfly's second fund and future development," he said. Pack told Fortune that his first fund with Feng Bo was "very successful," but he realized there was "a huge cultural gap" between them. "I spent several months helping recruit and train my replacement, and then we parted ways," he said. Similarly, Schmidt used more vivid language to describe Pack and attributed their split to personality clashes.
By the time Pack left in 2020, Dragonfly faced bigger challenges. Largely because of Feng Bo, the company's back-office team was based in Beijing. But the Chinese government began cracking down on cryptocurrencies, forcing Dragonfly to move its Asian operations to Singapore. According to Schmidt, Dragonfly still has a strong presence in Asia, although investments there have decreased over the years. Schmidt speaks Chinese and chose to intern at a Chinese company in college instead of accepting an early offer from Coinbase. "You look at the user bases of many of these public chains and DEXs, and it’s clear that they are primarily in Asia," he told Fortune, "but there really aren’t as many new investment opportunities as there used to be."
Nevertheless, Dragonfly's influence in the U.S. crypto scene continued to grow. At the time, larger players were raising massive funds, such as Paradigm and Haun Ventures, each with funds exceeding $1 billion, while Dragonfly's second fund, completed at the end of 2020, was relatively low-key at $225 million. But Dragonfly still hit on winners, such as Layer1 Avalanche, financial services company Amber Group, and the controversial privacy protocol Tornado Cash. The latter brought Dragonfly to the national headlines in 2025 when prosecutors inadvertently revealed in court that Schmidt might face criminal charges due to this investment in a larger money laundering case. (Later, the Department of Justice quickly retracted this, which ironically earned the company a badge of honor among crypto believers, although Qureshi stated that the investment was never ideological.)
However, at the critical moment for FTX, Hadick's arrival took Dragonfly to new heights and solidified the company's current standing.
New Era
In the 2021 crypto bull market, entrepreneurs proposed grand plans to reshape the internet using decentralized infrastructure, including potential alternatives to platforms like Twitter and Spotify. For crypto investors, these plans revolved around what is known as token mechanisms, where venture capital firms receive ownership of proprietary cryptocurrencies instead of traditional equity.
However, this vision of the future of Web3 never truly materialized. Even before the collapse of FTX, the crypto industry was rushing in one direction: Wall Street. Bitcoin initially served as electronic cash, followed by Ethereum which built the next layer to allow developers to write decentralized financial applications for lending and trading. But investors like Hadick, coming from traditional finance, believe that crypto technology will soon swallow all functions of banks and brokers. "We knew that at this point, we needed someone more knowledgeable than ourselves," Qureshi said. "Rob is the person we all believe has the strength, resources, and experience to take this on."
After Hadick's arrival, Dragonfly began investing in companies that now define the crypto landscape. One of them, Ethena, is building a synthetic dollar that generates yields using hedge fund-like complex strategies in the background. Although Ethena later became one of the most recognized projects in the crowded stablecoin race, many investors thought the idea was "crazy" when founder Guy Young pitched it. Young recalled that these skeptics brought up the collapse of Terra Luna, which almost dragged the entire crypto industry down, saying, "You just had something like that happen, and you still bring this up, that’s absurd."
It was still mid-2023 bear market, but Dragonfly seized this opportunity. "They were able to look at it from first principles," Young said. Dragonfly led Ethena’s $6 million seed round. Just over a year ago, Ethena completed another round of funding, raising $100 million, with investors including Franklin Templeton and Fidelity’s venture division. Today, its flagship stablecoin has a market capitalization of approximately $6.3 billion.
The following year, Dragonfly invested in Polymarket’s Series B round, having almost invested in this project years earlier. According to Qureshi, back in 2020 during Polymarket’s seed round, Dragonfly was close to being the first investor, but most VCs Shayne Coplan approached at that time rejected him. "We really liked him," Qureshi said, although the prediction market had not yet proven successful. Ultimately, Polychain made a better offer, and Dragonfly decided not to follow up. "This was clearly a huge miss for us, but our thinking was correct," Qureshi said.
Others in the crypto industry eventually agreed with this perspective: the most successful digital asset companies will not be blockchain-based mobile games, but relatively mundane financial products, such as credit cards and money market funds. Even Chris Dixon, a partner at a16z who once strongly advocated for the "Read-Write-Own" Web3 concept, recently posted on X stating that we are now in the "financial age of blockchain."
"This is the biggest meta shift I’ve felt in the industry," Schmidt said. He added that investors are realizing that the native tokens for different crypto protocols would become fewer in the future, while the tokens representing real-world assets like stocks and private credit funds would increase. "Now, many crypto funds are saying, 'Hey, we're fintech funds,'" Hadick said. "And that’s exactly where I think we excel more than anyone else."
The growing integration of blockchain and finance raises a troubling question: is crypto technology abandoning its founding intention—to view Bitcoin as a rebellious act against the dominance of big banks and government control of the financial system?
"I’ve always tried not to lose sight of the bigger picture: we’ve built this digital internet currency from zero to a trillion dollars in 10 years," Schmidt said. "This work is clearly not done, and I think the demand for it is greater than ever globally."
Now, nearly four years after Hadick joined, the crypto venture capital industry is facing another identity crisis, as trading volumes decline and funds struggle to convince investors to continue funding. But with newly raised capital, Dragonfly is ready to shape the next era of blockchain. "We speak loudly, we are straightforward," Qureshi said. "In a field filled with nonsense, scams, and BS artists, I think that’s actually a superpower."
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