Cryptocurrency venture capital firm Dragonfly Capital has finalized a $650 million fourth fund, marking one of the industry’s largest raises at a time when many blockchain-focused venture capital firms are struggling, said managing partner Haseeb Qureshi.
“It’s a strange time to celebrate,” Qureshi wrote on social media on Tuesday, describing the bad mood and “the gloom of a bear market” for crypto. However, he noted that Dragonfly had historically raised capital during economic downturns, including the ICO crash in 2018 and just before Terra’s collapse in 2022, the “vintages,” he said, ultimately became the company’s top performers.
In September, the company announced it was aiming to raise $500 million for its fourth fund, which would target early-stage projects. None of them have yet been identified. In May 2023, Dragonfly Capital raised $650 million for its third crypto fund aimed at early-stage companies.
“The biggest bet yet”
The new vehicle comes as token prices have fallen this year and fundraising at crypto companies has slowed sharply. Bitcoin has lost about 46% of its value since its all-time high of more than $126,000 in October last year, and the cryptocurrencies’ downward trend has wiped out more than $1.4 trillion in market capitalization.
While market sentiment remains bearish, Qureshi is optimistic about crypto’s financial use cases, saying the sector is “exploding,” while other non-financial use cases are failing. In fact, Dragonfly is increasingly relying on crypto-financial infrastructure, from stablecoins to tokenization and on-chain payments, reflecting a broader shift away from speculative Web3 applications toward blockchain-based financial services.
“Stablecoins are eating the world. DeFi has grown so big that it rivals CeFi. Financial institutions around the world are rushing to expand their crypto strategies. And prediction markets are becoming the most trusted source of truth on the internet,” he wrote.
Qureshi also pointed to the growth of Dragonfly’s recent investments, including Polymarket, Ethena, Rain, and Mesh, as examples of his thesis that crypto financial use cases are having a moment.
His comments come after Hong Kong Consensus 2026 venture capital firms struck a cautious tone on the state of the crypto market, amid prevailing bearish sentiment. Cryptocurrency venture capital firms that included Qureshi, Mo Shaikh of Maximum Frequency Ventures, and Paul Veradittakit of Pantera Capital all echoed the same sentiment: investing in what works, like stablecoins and tokenizations, while selectively betting on sectors like AI and prediction markets.
Qureshi appears to double down on the idea that the crypto industry is not dead, despite the gloom, but has just realigned and noted that the new fund is his company’s “biggest bet yet that the crypto revolution is still in the early stages of its exponential run.”
Fortune was the first to report Dragonfly’s recent surge.
