Dragonfly ＞|＜ @dragonfly

🚨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

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 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. agora.finance/blog/occ-condi…

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

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

🚨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

ethereum blobs are going vertical robinhood posted >40% of them last week

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

trent.eth @trent_vanepps

4 weeks ago

this week ethereum blob usage hit an all-time high: 3 day moving avg of 5.9 blobs/block & 6.7 daily avg!! but the ambition to keep scaling requires funding to client teams, which is increasingly scarce this is solvable - a $300b mcap chain should not have these problems

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.@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_

4 weeks ago

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

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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: youtu.be/Svic3FSVXuU 🎧 Spotify: bit.ly/3wiIOyy 🍎 Apple: bit.ly/3w9HQ7J 🎙 Podcast Home: choppingblock.xyz

Stoked to be on the judging panel at Metropolis, @monad's flagship global hackathon. Looking forward to seeing what teams build!

Monad @monad

4 weeks ago

Introducing the Metropolis global hackathon Six weeks to build the next generation of startups on Monad. 4 tracks. Over $250K in prizes for builders. Submissions end October 13th. monad.xyz/metropolis

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@sapiom @i_zerbib coded

Ben Cera @Bencera

4 weeks ago

x.com/i/article/2095…

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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: token2049.com/singapore/tick…

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

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

Abliteration.ai @abliteration_ai

4 weeks ago

Today we're releasing abliterated-model-large-v2. Based on GLM-5.3, which is #3 on Terminal-Bench 4.0 (behind only Opus 5 and Fable), with 2× the cyber exploitation of 5.2. We abliterated and hosted it so it does the offensive cyber, red teaming, and agent testing work other

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@hosseeb @MTSlive

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

"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

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

a month ago

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,

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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!