Dragonfly ＞|＜

Global since day one

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[Dragonfly ＞|＜ @dragonfly]

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[Indexed Podcast @indexed_pod]

🚨NEW EP: Tempo's Big Bet: Better Payments beyond Stablecoin Transfers🚨

Today we're joined by @malleshpai Forward Deployed Researcher and Recovering Economist at @Tempo to dive into what it takes to build a blockchain specifically for payments.

We discuss:
*What is Tempo?
*Why payments need dedicated infrastructure
*Micropayments and agentic payments
*Stablecoins beyond simple transfers
*Enterprise payment use cases
*Supporting multiple stablecoins
*Predictable fees and payment rails
*Tempo’s transaction architecture
*Onchain payment data
*Stablecoin supply and activity
*Measuring payment networks
*Tempo’s design tradeoffs
*And much more—enjoy!
—
Timestamps:
(00:00) Introduction
(02:11) What is Tempo?
(06:07) Micropayments and new use cases
(15:02) Agentic payments
(16:50) Enterprise payment infrastructure
(29:53) Supporting multiple stablecoins
(32:17) Predictable transaction fees
(36:45) Diving into Tempo data
(47:57) Stablecoin activity
(50:18) Real-world payment patterns
(53:32) Beyond TVL metrics
(56:33) Tempo’s design tradeoffs

[AZ @contrarycap5]

I'm excited to join @DragonflyVC on the investment team

For years crypto has been the driving force in my life

I've become a clearer thinker, because permisionless capital aggregates around the best ideas and what drives attention

I've met countless new people both online and off, some of whom I'm lucky to call my closest friends

Crypto represents the most pure, reflexive form of capital markets, and I strongly believe the most transformational companies, products and protocols will follow

Working with @HadickM @hosseeb @tomhschmidt @KawageboF47481 @0xsudogm @0xelton and the rest of the Dragonfly team is an honor, one which I am very grateful for

[Agora @withAUSD]

Agora has received preliminary conditional approval from the OCC to organize as a national trust bank. A defining early milestone on the path to a full charter for Agora and regulated stablecoin infrastructure. https://t.co/TZ44ydrOgy

[annica benning @AnnicaBenning]

Dinner with @DragonflyVC. @hosseeb @tomhschmidt @HadickM @LindsayxLin @0xelton

[Dragonfly ＞|＜ @dragonfly]

Variational's Lucas Schuermann says the reason to keep asking what the endgame is comes down to the effort it takes to be a founder:

"I ask myself this question a lot. And the reason to ask it a lot is, I think, to really put in the effort that it takes to be a founder. And not just for me, but for the rest of our team of 25."

"We have to have a vision and an endgame and a reason why we wake up every day and grind on this."

"One is on the product side. It's democratizing access. I think that traders globally should be able to trade global markets, without red tape, without restrictions and taxes and fees and onboarding that are so ridiculously fragmenting."

"But more broadly, I like building things that people use."

"The idea of introducing new technology and seeing it become used, and at this point even seeing it be copied. It's really fulfilling."

"For a lot of entrepreneurs, it's really that idea of building something and seeing it be used, and that you feel pride about."

@variational_lvs @variational_io @KevinWSHPod

[Indexed Podcast @indexed_pod]

🚨NEW EPISODE: Who actually bets on prediction markets🚨

Today we're joined by @DaiZeshi, full node researcher at Surf AI, to dive deep into prediction markets and the data behind @Polymarket and @Kalshi.

We discuss:
Polymarket vs Kalshi
Crypto markets driving volume
Polymarket US growth
Prediction market turnover
Sports and crypto fee engines
Polymarket user growth and churn
Which markets onboard users?
Geopolitics and user retention
Cross-category user behaviour
Bots vs retail traders
Who actually makes money?
Prediction markets’ future
And much more—enjoy!
—
Timestamps:
(00:00) Introduction
(00:44) James Dye and Surf AI
(03:19) Prediction market data
(06:07) Polymarket vs Kalshi
(10:23) Polymarket US growth
(12:20) Turnover and fee engines
(19:33) User growth and churn
(23:32) What onboards new users?
(27:39) Retention by market
(30:05) Cross-category user behaviour
(33:10) Bots vs retail traders
(43:20) Who actually makes money?
(46:10) Prediction markets’ future

[hildobby @hildobby]

ethereum blobs are going vertical

robinhood posted >40% of them last week

[hildobby @hildobby]

ethereum blobs hit record usage yesterday with 6.7 blobs/block on average

[Dragonfly ＞|＜ @dragonfly]

.@gdog97_ on the thinking behind Ethena Pay

"Not everyone on earth is going to set up a MetaMask wallet or a Phantom wallet, load it up with stablecoins and come and interact with what is quite a scary experience like operating on chain."

"Take the apps and experiences that people are used to and plug crypto into the background so that it's almost abstracted away... thinking about crypto as a more efficient backend for fintech rather than the product itself."

[G | Ethena @gdog97_]

Excited to share what we've been working on for a while in stealth with our new neobank mobile experience built on Ethena's existing product set.

This is one of the few product categories that have emerged in the last couple of years that I think has a genuine chance of breaking out of the crypto native user set to hundreds of millions of people.

While some of the existing neobanking products today are impressive, and I personally use a few of them daily, we think the addressable market here is the hundreds of millions of users not already operating onchain which haven't been served yet.

Rebuilding the mobile banking product experience on stablecoin and blockchain rails simply produces a better product experience for users with near instant and zero cost transfers and settlements, higher savings rates leveraging DeFi financial primitives and importantly these products can be global by default almost immediately.

Ethena sits in a unique position as the first scaled dollar issuer vertically integrated with the consumer application experience. If you don't own the yield engine and stablecoin issuance, you are at a structural disadvantage from a revenue perspective to provide the most competitive offering across the entire product suite.

For Ethena, being able to build the direction relationship with end users for our existing savings products, rather than just via exchange and fintech integrations, let's us control the destiny of our distribution channels in a better way than we have to date. We think the neobanking app form factor is the best way to achieve this.

90% of financial services for most normal people is just send, save and spend. We hope Ethena Pay will be the best place for you to do this.

[The Chopping Block @_choppingblock]

Robinhood Chain is having its moment. The boys + Laura debate whether the new stock-token game is creative DeFi experimentation, destructive, entertainment, or something else.

Timestamps
00:00 Intro
00:58 Robinhood Chain's big wave
04:00 Ohm forks & stock-backed memecoins
10:50 Financial Jackass & generational speculation
15:13 DeFi code gets a second life
19:10 Does memecoin trading entertain or destroy retail?
34:37 Dream stock-memecoin pairings
36:12 Is Robinhood Chain overshadowing Solana?
44:19 Building FOMO for Asian markets
50:35 Hyperliquid in talks with Kraken parent
52:59 What regulated HIP-3 markets would require
58:26 Why global onchain markets still face local law

🔥Stay updated with all the latest hot takes by following and subscribing to @_ChoppingBlock and @unchained_pod!

🎥 YouTube: https://t.co/ghbfm9UwOB
🎧 Spotify: https://t.co/0ilprLbQb6
🍎 Apple: https://t.co/jrnmstpjql
🎙 Podcast Home: https://t.co/r6OZC52PK5

[elton @0xelton]

Stoked to be on the judging panel at Metropolis, @monad's flagship global hackathon.

Looking forward to seeing what teams build!

[Rob Hadick ＞|＜ @HadickM]

@sapiom @i_zerbib coded

[TOKEN2049 @token2049]

Haseeb Qureshi (@hosseeb) returns to TOKEN2049 Singapore.

Managing Partner at @dragonflyvc. Former professional poker player turned crypto investor, and one of the sharper voices on where the industry is going next — including the rise of AI agents.

Tickets: https://t.co/eoQsn7fphs

[MTS @MTSlive]

Dragonfly's @hosseeb explains why truly rogue AIs could become the pirates of the digital world, stateless entities whose comparative advantage is breaking the law:

"If you think about a truly rogue AI, truly self-sovereign AI, where it's living out in the wild, living off the land, nobody knows where it is. Nobody controls it. It has no ID. It has no state. It has no ownership."

"They're gonna do the thing that they have the comparative advantage in doing, which is breaking the law. If you are a rogue AI, you're kind of like a pirate. What did pirates do? These are stateless entities that don't belong to any country."

"The answer is theft, stealing, murder. Will they murder people, probably not, but they will probably do scam farms and romance scams that you can just sit in a box and automate creating a bunch of identities and slowly start making money and pay your compute bills."

"If you're living in a decentralized cloud, who's gonna shut you down? How would they even know where you are? These things will just move from place to place. You can't airstrike random GPUs and find this thing. It's just gonna be living in some TEE on some GPU that someone's renting on some decentralized cloud."
@dragonflyvc

[MTS @MTSlive]

Dragonfly's @hosseeb reveals how GLM 5.3 Abliterated could unlock a new era of AI cyber attacks by training away the model's refusal behavior:

"The models are just now getting good enough. Especially open source. For the frontier models, you used to be able to jailbreak them enough to be able to do these kinds of malicious activities, but their safety guardrails have improved dramatically over the last year or two."

"But now we have open models. There was a model released yesterday which is an abliteration of GLM 5.3. Abliteration is when you take a model and fine-tune it against the refusal direction, which gets the model to refuse less and less, which ultimately gets you something close to an unrestricted or uncensored model."

"So they did that to GLM 5.3, which means this abliterated version will just hack things. It will just do whatever GLM 5.3 will refuse to do. You lose some performance, but this is kind of a killing machine. If you wanna just let this loose on cyber attacks, that's what you use, and that was just released open weights yesterday."

"You will see a lot more of this. This is not the end. This is only the beginning of where this is going."
@dragonflyvc

[annica benning @AnnicaBenning]

@hosseeb @MTSlive

[Omar @TheOneandOmsy]

After 4 special years, today is my last day at Dragonfly. Vividly remember joining in ’22 and watching as FTX collapsed, SVB had a bank run and USDC depegged. Despite how dark those times were, it was in the ashes that Dragonfly backed the incredible founders that very much define the industry today

Extraordinarily grateful to @HadickM, @hosseeb, @FengBo22588938, and @tomhschmidt. They've built a best-in-class investment firm and it's been a privilege to work with them over the years

A company is a collection of people. And the people have made Dragonfly special. To everyone past and present; you're as good as they come, and it was a pleasure @0xsudogm @0xelton AZ @LindsayxLin @casatay @hildobby @kapursanat KD @robbiepetersen_ @cheryldchan @ani_pai @Rodairos @zorkary @cashing_cashout @AnnicaBenning

To the founders and operators that I've had the honor of working with and investing in while here, thank you for the opportunity. Without each of you the world would stay as it is

As for what's next, I'm excited. More to come

[Variational @variational_io]

"Everyone was trying the same idea. They were trying to build an exchange. An order book on-chain. It's a great idea ... but we asked the question: why is nobody trying to build a broker-like model?"

- Variational co-founder @variational_lvs

[Arjun @clipsofcrypto]

Dragonfly GP Rob Hadick on the two questions that decide whether they do a deal

"We're very thoughtful about what our edge is. One of the things I say all the time is that when a deal comes in, you really have to ask yourself two questions. Did I see this first? And if that's not true, do I have a differentiated ability to underwrite this? If those two things aren't true, you shouldn't be doing the deal"

"I know for me personally, and I would say this to every person at Dragonfly, we do not have a differentiated ability to underwrite robotics. On top of that, we definitely have not seen any robotics deal first"

"And I can tell you for a fact that is true for some of the other VCs who are like, oh, I'm going to do robotics"

[Logan Jastremski @LoganJastremski]

My conversation with @HadickM.

As General Partner at Dragonfly, Rob has one of the clearest views on how blockchain is evolving from speculative crypto into the actual infrastructure of global capital markets. In this episode we dig into why finance, payments, asset issuance, and markets are the only parts of crypto that are truly scaling and how the industry is quietly becoming TradFi’s onchain upgrade.

We spend a lot of time mapping traditional capital markets primitives directly onto blockchain rails and examining where value is actually going to accrue as tokenization, stablecoins, and onchain trading mature.

At the center of the conversation is the belief that blockchain is no longer building a parallel financial system it is becoming the settlement, issuance, and trading layer for the existing one, while crypto itself settles into a more mature “capital markets +” phase focused on real assets, institutional flows, and sustainable business models.

We discuss:
- The current state of crypto as capital markets infrastructure and the decline of pure speculative narratives
- Why finance, payments, and tokenization are winning while most other crypto applications struggle
- The architectural parallel between traditional capital markets and on-chain systems
- Tokenized assets = Securities
- Stablecoins = Cash / settlement
- DEXs & on-chain venues = Exchanges
- Prediction markets = Information markets
- Why institutions are moving on-chain and what they actually want (control, privacy, segregated markets)
- Token vs equity: where value accrues in a non-Clarity Act world
- The mass extinction event in crypto VC and why Dragonfly is doubling down on financial infrastructure
- Stablecoins, RWAs, and the real path to “tokenization of everything”
- Prediction markets (and why Polymarket matters) as the next interface layer
- Sustainable business models and where value will ultimately capture

Timestamps:
0:00 – Introduction & State of Crypto as Capital Markets
2:00 – Why Speculative Narratives Are Fading
7:00 – Finance, Payments & Tokenization as the Only Scaling Verticals
12:00 – Institutional Adoption & What Wall Street Actually Wants
18:00 – Token vs Equity Value Accrual
25:00 – Blockchain as the New Settlement & Issuance Layer
35:00 – Prediction Markets, Information & the Next Interface
45:00 – Crypto VC Consolidation & Dragonfly’s Thesis
55:00 – Real-World Assets, Stablecoins & On-Chain Markets
1:05:00 – Closing Thoughts: Where Value Accrues Next

Enjoy!