Bitcoin has rebounded off 2026 lows, but the broader digital asset market is still navigating a complex landscape.
And after months of deleveraging, the space is stabilizing but remains constrained by macro forces, with liquidity expectations taking center stage in the absence of large derivative players.
But beneath the surface, the industry is undergoing.
What some insiders may call a massive meta shift while the focus is hurtling away from a rebellious Web 3 utopian and straight toward Wall Street, replacing native app tokens with RWAs.
Meanwhile, Dragonfly Capital recently closing a massive $650 million fourth fund.
Well joining me live at the New York Stock Exchange is Rob Hadick, general partner. global crypto investment firm Dragonfly, Rob, great to have you here.
Thank you so much for joining me again.
Well, there are a lot of headlines and a lot of volatility across all asset classes, so I think a good place to start would be prediction markets, and I know over at Dragonfly you have backed early winners including Poly Market and Rain.
So what do you make of what we're seeing in prediction markets right now?
Predictions, it's interesting because they've been around for a long time.
They're not that new.
We saw prediction markets take center stage during the 1st 202,020 election, the first election that President Trump lost, and then they really kind of accelerated into business markets and into global politics and now into sports and other types of events as well over the last 1518 months.
Now what we've seen is every single month.
Poly Marci, they're getting new all-time highs in terms of all-time interest, new all-time highs in terms of volume, and we're starting to see them take center stage for just being a source of truth across any different types of asset class or any different types of exposure that you might want, whether that's equity exposure in terms of will somebody beat or miss earnings, that's you know we're seeing quite a bit on the weather side with the large snowstorm that we had here on the East Coast a few months ago, and we're starting to see them take center stage in terms of Being a way for us to parse information and to understand how a broad set of derivatives and spot assets are trading, and so that's been really exciting I think and we see kind of a broad set of use cases and I think that's what drove NYSE's investment into Polymarket to put $2 billion in back in September.
So we're excited to see that continue to grow and for them to continue to professionalize in a way that will bring them to a much more broad audience and I think what we're looking.
At the digital asset space, there are many ways to look at this.
First would be price action in terms of what's happening across crypto, but also regulatory progress as well as innovation.
And you and I were here at the New York Stock Exchange.
We continue to hear headlines about the exchanges and how they're getting involved with tokenization.
But given what we're seeing in terms of price action, give us an understanding of the temperature right now.
So there's really two.
Worlds in the crypto digital asset market right now.
There's what you talked about, which is this institutionalization that's happening, right?
There's the real world assets that are being tokenized on chain.
I think there's about 26 billion unquote real world assets on chain now.
If you include like Broaderridge and others who are doing things like repo on chain and sort of these kind of closed loop systems as well, there's over $260 billion of assets that are represented on chain today.
Nasdaq obviously earlier this week, I believe it was or maybe it was late last week announced.
That they're going to do something with Kraken to allow for tokenized assets and to trade 24/7 and NICE has also been talking about this as well with their investment into OKX.
And so you start to see that there's this very clear tailwind behind just everything that's happening on the institutional side of crypto.
At the same time, Bitcoin has been a little bit soft this year.
They're trading much more in line with risk assets more broadly, and as you and I were talking about earlier, uncertainty is kind of the name of the game and I think the risk asset market today.
And then you have the long tail of crypto, which is where it's, I think, a little bit unclear how those tokens are exposed to the outcome of the protocols and if they can represent sort of ownership or dividends or buybacks, etc. and that's what we're seeing kind of get debated in Washington right now with the Clarity Act.
And speaking of polymarket, poly market today has the passage of a Clarity Act at 63% likely to happen this year.
If that happens, I think we'll see it much more likely that these a broad set of what we call alt tokens trade a lot better because now it will be very clear that they can potentially have exposure to the outcomes of the applications that they represent.
Well Rob, always great talking to you.
Thank you so much for joining me here at the New York Stock Exchange and thank you so much for sharing all of your insights as well as your perspective.
Thank you for having me.
Thank you.
