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, the hedge fund GoldenTree, he was not allowed to work in a similar role for six months. Hadick had intended to enjoy life during this forced sabbatical, but his leisurely vacation plans quickly fell through.
He had just joined when the infamous stablecoin project Terra Luna collapsed, causing a crash in the cryptocurrency market. Hadick recalls that during the crisis, he kept refreshing Twitter. His wife called to ask if he was relaxing. He replied, "You might not quite understand what our net worth is going through," "At two o'clock on Tuesday afternoon, I was sitting in a little black room drinking whiskey."
Moreover, when his 'exile' finally ended in November, he encountered the second crypto disaster: the collapse of FTX. But Hadick has never regretted his decision to fully immerse himself in the crypto industry. "What was happening in the industry at that time scared me," he said recently in Dragonfly's office near Union Square in New York, speaking to (Fortune) magazine. "But I am excited about the opportunities we have because we still have $500 million to invest."
It is this third fund that propelled Dragonfly to the top tier of crypto venture capital, alongside companies like Andreessen Horowitz and Paradigm. This was due to their precise bets on now-thriving startups like Polymarket, Rain, and Ethena. Now, as token prices plummet and market enthusiasm is diluted by the AI craze, cryptocurrency has again entered a winter, and Dragonfly announced the launch of its fourth fund, totaling $650 million.
As Hadick said, the crypto venture capital ecosystem is experiencing a 'mass extinction event,' but Dragonfly has withstood the test of founder splits, regulatory panic from the U.S. Department of Justice, and the withdrawal from the Chinese market in the context of a crackdown on cryptocurrencies in China, thriving instead. The core of Dragonfly's strategy is its four complementary leaders: Hadick, with a fintech background, plays a bridging role; Haseeb Qureshi is the brand ambassador; DeFi wizard Tom Schmidt; and the company's mysterious founder, a prominent figure in China's tech scene, Feng Bo. "It feels wonderful to see us become one of the old players now," Qureshi said. "We are playing a bigger game than in the past."
Origin Story
Qureshi started playing professional poker at the age of 16 because he couldn't get into a casino, mainly competing online. By the age of 21, Qureshi had already made nearly 2 million dollars, but he realized he didn’t 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 have to pay his friend $100,000. "This is how I completely cut off that thought," he told (Fortune) magazine.
Qureshi stated that his early experiences at online poker tables prepared him for his later transition into crypto investing. Just as his friends thought it was crazy for him to become a professional poker player at such a young age, his decision to enter the crypto industry also raised widespread skepticism, especially since Qureshi had previously gained some fame in Silicon Valley as a software engineer. In 2017, he left a high-paying job at Airbnb to start a stablecoin startup—long before stablecoins became a craze—before eventually joining the then $500 million venture capital fund MetaStable.
Today, Qureshi can be seen as the public face of Dragonfly, thanks to his performances on the popular podcast Chopping Block (the crypto industry version of All-In) and his popular posts on Crypto Twitter about the failures of Web3 games or the effectiveness of launching blockchain projects. But Qureshi did not join Dragonfly at its inception; he came on board in 2019 when the crypto industry was deeply entrenched in a cyclical long-term downturn.
The early Dragonfly is vastly different from the current one. The company was initially co-founded by Alex Pack and Feng Bo. Pack was a young venture capitalist at Bain Capital Ventures responsible for cryptocurrency trading; Feng Bo was a well-known figure in China's booming internet ecosystem and one of the top investors.
Through his fund, Feng Bo invested in the cryptocurrency exchange OKEx (later renamed OKX), which was the largest exchange in the world in 2018. He teamed up with Pack to bet simultaneously in both the U.S. and Asia. According to an early article from Bitcoin Magazine, Dragonfly's first $100 million fund received support from some of the loudest names in Asia's tech scene, including Sequoia China’s Shen Nanpeng. (In addition to acting as a bridge connecting the region's financial giants, Qureshi described Feng Bo as a 'master of relationships,' although he remains low-key in public.)
Dragonfly has gradually established its reputation by investing in crypto companies like Bybit and Matrixport, and by investing in other crypto venture funds in a fund-of-funds format. According to Qureshi, when he joined, he set three conditions: to stop fund-of-funds investments, to lead more deals, and to build a tech team. "Feng Bo basically agreed to all of them," Qureshi said. "In his words, he threw the car keys to me... this is the birth of modern Dragonfly." One of Qureshi's early moves was to recruit 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, Hack VC. His split from Dragonfly is considered a legendary story in the crypto venture capital circle, although Qureshi downplayed the drama. "Ultimately, we have completely different visions for Dragonfly's second fund and future development," he said. Pack told (Fortune) that their first fund was 'very successful,' but he realized there was a 'significant cultural difference' between them. "I spent months helping to recruit and train my replacement, and then we parted ways," he said. Similarly, Schmidt used more colorful language to describe Pack and attributed the split to personality clashes.
By the time Pack left in 2020, Dragonfly faced bigger problems. Largely due to Feng Bo, the company's back-end 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 influence in Asia, even though investments in the region have decreased over the years. Schmidt speaks Chinese and chose to intern at a Chinese company during college rather than accept an early offer from Coinbase. "You look at the user base of many of these public chains and DEXs, and it’s clear that they are primarily in Asia," he told (Fortune), "but in terms of new investment opportunities, there really aren't as many as before."
Nevertheless, Dragonfly's influence in the American crypto circle has been increasing. At that 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 only $225 million. But Dragonfly still hit the jackpot with winners like Layer1 Avalanche, financial services company Amber Group, and the controversial privacy protocol Tornado Cash. The latter brought Dragonfly to national headlines in 2025 when prosecutors inadvertently revealed in a larger money laundering case that Schmidt might face criminal charges due to this investment. (Later, the Justice Department quickly backtracked, 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 of FTX's life and death, Hadick's joining took Dragonfly to new heights and established the company's current position.
New Era
During the 2021 crypto bull market, entrepreneurs proposed grand blueprints to reshape the internet using decentralized infrastructure, including potential alternatives to platforms like Twitter and Spotify. For crypto investors, these plans revolved around so-called token mechanisms, where venture capital firms obtain ownership of proprietary cryptocurrencies instead of traditional equity.
However, this vision for the future of Web3 has never really been realized. Even before the collapse of FTX, the crypto industry was racing in one direction: Wall Street. Bitcoin was initially an electronic cash, and then Ethereum built the next layer, allowing developers to write decentralized financial applications for lending and trading. But investors like Hadick from traditional finance believe that crypto technology will soon swallow up all functions of banks and brokerage firms. "We know that at this point, we need someone who understands the industry better than we do," said Qureshi. "Rob is the person we all have in mind who has the strength, resources, and experience to take on this role."
After Hadick joined, Dragonfly began investing in companies that now define the crypto landscape. One of them, called Ethena, is building a synthetic dollar that generates returns by employing hedge fund-like complex strategies in the background. Although Ethena later became one of the most well-known projects in the crowded stablecoin space, most 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 nearly dragged down the entire crypto industry, saying, 'Right after something like this happens, you still mention this, it's ridiculous.'
It was still the mid-point of the 2023 bear market, but Dragonfly seized the opportunity. "They can view it from first principles," Young said. Dragonfly led a $6 million seed round for Ethena. Just over a year ago, Ethena completed a $100 million funding round, with investors including Franklin Templeton and Fidelity’s venture arm. Today, its flagship stablecoin has a market cap of approximately $6.3 billion.
The following year, Dragonfly invested in Polymarket's Series B funding, having almost invested in the project a few years earlier. According to Qureshi, back in 2020 during Polymarket's seed round, Dragonfly almost became the first investor when most of the VCs Shayne Coplan approached rejected him. "We really liked him," Qureshi said, despite the fact that the prediction market had not yet proven successful at that time. Ultimately, Polychain offered better terms, and Dragonfly decided not to follow up. "This was obviously a big mistake on our part, but our thinking was correct," Qureshi said.
Others in the crypto industry eventually agreed with this view: the most successful digital asset companies won’t be blockchain mobile games, but relatively dull financial products like credit cards and money market funds. Even Chris Dixon, a partner at a16z who once vigorously advocated for the 'read-write-own' Web3 concept, recently posted on X, stating that we are now in the 'financial era of blockchain.'
"This is the biggest paradigm shift I've felt in the industry," Schmidt said. He added that investors are realizing that the future native tokens for different crypto protocols will become fewer, while tokens representing real-world assets like stocks and private credit funds will increase. "Now many crypto funds are saying, 'Hey, we are fintech funds,'" Hadick said. "And that's exactly where I think we excel more than anyone else."
The increasing integration of blockchain and finance raises a troubling question: Is crypto technology betraying its founding intention—to view Bitcoin as a rebellious act against major banks and government control of the financial system?
"I have always tried not to lose sight of the big picture: we have taken this digital internet currency from zero to trillions in 10 years," Schmidt said. "This work is clearly not done, and globally, I think the demand for this is greater than ever before."
Now, nearly four years after Hadick joined, the crypto venture capital industry is in another identity crisis, with declining trading volumes and funds struggling 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 speak frankly," Qureshi said. "In a field filled with bullshit, fraudsters, and big talkers, I think that is actually a superpower."