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 inserters may call a massive meta ship while the. hurtling away from a rebellious month 3 utopian straight toward Wall Street replacing native app tokens with RAs meanwhile Dragonfly Capital recently closing a massive $650 million forth fund.
Well joining me live at the New York Stock Exchange is Rob Paddock general partner at global crypto investment firm Dragonfly.
Rob, great to have you here.
Thank you so much for joining me again.
What are you focused on over at Dragonfly.
So we're really focused on the things that we kind of know are working, right?
So there's been a lot of, you know, we're venture capitalists, so we have to think about, you know, what happens in 2 years, 5 years, 8 years, 10 years, right?
I think there was, um, I think it was Naval who once said that what venture capitalists do on the weekend is what, you know, kind of the normal person will be doing on the weekend in 5 or 10 years, right?
So that's what we try to do.
So there's a lot of conversation right now about, OK, well what is the future of AI?
How does AI interact with blockchains, those sort of things.
AI agents are going to be doing a lot of work for us and will they be needing to use blockchains for payments.
We continue to be very, very focused on stablecoins broadly.
You mentioned a portfolio company of ours called Rain.
Rain is powering basically stablecoin settlement directly with Visa.
Visa has kind of stood up this business where they're doing instead of using an issuer bank, they're doing direct settlement with an issuer in stablecoins.
That business has grown from basically nonexistent a year ago to now doing $6 billion annualized, and it's growing.
Incredibly quickly, Rain, our portfolio company, is powering the vast majority of that, and we're starting to see them now do things on the acquiring side of the payment stack as well.
And then things like prediction markets, we're still very focused on decentralized finance.
I think that's going to play a big role in the future, the hyperliquid.
I think there's been a lot of talk about recently, but hyperliquid is doing tremendous amounts of volume, you know, call it 6 to $10 billion a day, and it's trading 24/7, obviously, and so that allows for these exposures over the weekend.
And in fact talking about RWAs, we're also seeing Hyperlinks start to do billions of dollars a day in commodity kind of derivatives and other types of real world asset derivatives and so we're seeing these two places converge this real world institutional crypto and DeFi and stablecoins and tokenization converge, and that's, I think, really interesting about what the future of finance looks like and how we can think through having better financial rails than we have today.
Yes, so those are a lot of things that we're also paying attention to here and some of the sums that you mentioned are pretty significant.
So I do want to get your take on what we're seeing in artificial intelligence.
We all know that AI is going to bring massive Of change across all industries, but in your space, what are you looking at in particular with AI?
So it's very, very early today and there's been a lot of talk about crypto or blockchains and AI intersecting for a while.
It's Very clear that we're not there yet, but we're starting to see some signs of life and things like decentralized inference, so ways to coordinate inference across a bunch of different counterparties, that is not through a centralized intermediary, right?
There's a business that Eric Voorhees, who's kind of a crypto OG, started called VVV that is the name of the token, but they're allowing you to get Access to a bunch of different models, both kind of centralized models like you and I know of the clouds and Opus and OpenAIs and also kind of the long tail of models.
It allows more user choice, right?
A lot of this is about allowing users to have more control over the models that they interact with or the ways that they interact with AI.
We're seeing signs of life there a little bit.
And then there's things like X402 which come out of Coinbase, which is trying to allow for stable coin payments with agents.
Very early days, I think we're going to see a lot more to come over the next couple of years.
I think AI more broadly, it's just, you know, who kind of knows right now what the world will look like in 5 years.
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.
