Crypto venture firm Dragonfly Capital completed a fourth fund of $650 million, marking one of the biggest raises in the sector at a time when many blockchain-focused VCs are struggling, managing partner Haseeb Qureshi said.
“It’s a strange time to celebrate,” Qureshi wrote in a social media post on Tuesday, describing low spirits and “the gloom of a bear market” for crypto. However, he noted that Dragonfly has historically raised capital during downturns, including the 2018 ICO crash and just before the Terra collapse in 2022, the ‘vintages’, he said, were ultimately the firm’s best performers.
In September, the firm said it aimed to raise $500 million for its fourth fund, which would target early-stage projects. It has yet to identify any of them. In May 2023, Dragonfly Capital raised $650 million for its third crypto fund for later-stage companies.
‘Biggest bet yet’
The new vehicle comes as token prices fell this year and fundraising across crypto ventures has fallen sharply. Bitcoin has lost about 46% of its value since its all-time high of more than $126,000 last October, and the crypto downtrend 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. Indeed, Dragonfly has increasingly leaned into crypto-financial infrastructure, from stablecoins to tokenization and on-chain payments, reflecting a broader shift away from speculative Web3 applications and toward blockchain-based financial services.
“Stablecoins are eating the world. DeFi has grown so big it rivals CeFi. Financial institutions around the world are racing to build their crypto strategies. And the prediction markets are becoming the most trusted source of truth on the Internet,” he wrote.
Qureshi also noted the growth of Dragonfly’s recent investments, including Polymarket, Athena, Rain and Mesh, as examples of his thesis that crypto’s economic use cases are having a moment.
His comments come after VC firms at Consensus Hong Kong 2026 struck a cautious tone about the state of the crypto market amid prevailing bearish sentiment. The crypto VCs, who included Qureshi, Maximum Frequency Ventures’ Mo Shaikh and Pantera Capital’s Paul Veradittakit, all echoed the same sentiment: Invest in what works, like stablecoins and tokenizations, while selectively betting on sectors like AI and prediction markets.
Qureshi seems to be doubling down on the idea that the crypto industry is not dead, despite the gloom, but just changing, noting that the new fund is his firm’s “biggest bet yet that the crypto revolution is still early in its exponential.”
Fortune was the first to report Dragonfly’s latest raise.
