Haseeb

Dragonfly’s $650 million fourth fund is a countercyclical bet on financial crypto, not a claim that the market hangover is over. Haseeb says the firm now manages roughly $4 billion and raised amid what Fortune called an “extinction-level event for crypto VCs.” With valuations down and capital scarce, “money goes a long way”: the mandate is to buy durable financial infrastructure while “everything is on sale.”

Haseeb’s foundational thesis is that crypto succeeds when it touches money, while most non-financial visions were an industry-created “fever dream.” Bitcoin, Ethereum, ICOs, DeFi, NFTs, stablecoins, RWAs, perpetuals, and prediction markets all won bottom-up adoption; decentralized social media, DAOs, gaming, and metaverse land were narratives investors talked themselves into. His post-Gensler challenge is blunt: “Where are all the games?… Nobody wants these things.”

The host’s institutional-capture “black pill” gets rejected because incumbent adoption is backward-looking and does not reproduce crypto’s defining properties. NYSE trading 24/7 or institutions tokenizing bonds may be useful, but neither necessarily requires a blockchain nor delivers “global, permissionless, 24/7 programmable finance.” Haseeb compares fears of BlackRock owning crypto to early predictions that Time magazine or Walmart would own the internet: incumbents can migrate existing products online without capturing the new layer’s scarce value.

Haseeb sees patience—and avoiding forced liquidation—as crypto’s most persistent edge. Bitcoin had been near $120,000 only four months earlier, yet the party had abruptly become a “violently hung over” market; his answer is that ICO, DeFi, FTX, and Luna collapses punished those forced to sell while the underlying system kept growing. “Patience is the antidote to almost all problems in crypto.”

Crypto’s scams will never disappear because making money permissionless liberates the worst of human behavior alongside the best, but Haseeb thinks the scam-to-substance ratio has improved materially since 2017. The next speculative revival will not simply resurrect memecoins: like online poker, every game becomes professionalized until amateurs leave and “shark on shark action” remains. He expects a new, probably AI-native game that today’s trench traders will initially dismiss as stupid.

Agentic commerce is a “yes-and” market: approved purchases can stay on credit cards, while truly autonomous agents need crypto-like settlement. Closed AI labs are unlikely to tolerate the liability of agents spending without human approval, and card networks will resist prompt-injected purchases followed by chargebacks. Stablecoins supply the opposite API—irreversible, global, buyer-beware payments—for agents paying other agents, unknown counterparties, or financial markets, especially outside the U.S.

The agent-payment thesis is still far ahead of its evidence. Haseeb describes x402 activity as tiny, with rough figures ranging from “less than a million dollars” to around “a million a day” after discussing farms, and warns that an agent given crypto today may lose it within days. His bet rests on rapidly improving models and human demand to automate procurement and work, not on meaningful current volumes.

On AI, Haseeb expects U.S. frontier labs to widen their lead, eventually become quasi-national-security contractors, and receive government support in a genuine bust. He tentatively places that transition around 2028–29, when military use and economic disruption become large enough to require clearances and Los Alamos-style secrecy. His closing operating principle spans both technologies: “Stay in the game,” because consistent participants often outlast smarter rivals who win early and check out.

Santiago’s core call is that crypto has invested more than $100 billion in infrastructure without proving durable demand, leaving L1s radically overvalued. Ethereum at roughly $380 billion against about $1 billion of revenue implies a 380x price-to-sales multiple; Solana’s comparison was roughly $75 billion against $1–2 billion. Until activity survives without cheap money and speculation, he sees these networks as “closer to Wynn casino in Macau than technology companies.”

Haseeb argues that valuing an L1 like a mature company is a category error because networks resemble cities or states whose value includes accumulated capital, not just current tax revenue. Ethereum deliberately lowered the burden on users and pushed scaling because “the future is much larger than the present”; like Singapore, it can keep taxes low while attracting wealth, then monetize later. He treats TVL as a rough stock measure of capital and activity, with durability mattering more than transient deposits.

Both agree that Ethereum, Solana, and BNB Chain have real moats, but they disagree over whether tokenholders can capture them. Haseeb points to persistent capital, applications, and developers: without moats, L1s would mean-revert like interchangeable restaurants. He used Linux and Tim Berners-Lee to illustrate that a moat need not accrue to its creator; Santiago ultimately accepted the open-source moat but pressed the monetization question: “What is the point of having an advantage if you are not monetizing it?”

The most tradeable disagreement is whether value migrates upward to applications and user aggregators or remains embedded in settlement assets. Haseeb cited a 1kx analysis in which L1s represented roughly 90% of market capitalization but only 12% of fees, while DeFi produced 73% of fees at under 10% of valuation. Haseeb concedes that applications can capture enormous value, but says Ethereum aggregates capital even when wallets, exchanges, and protocols aggregate users.

Santiago presented several application and protocol valuations as more attractive than Ethereum’s: Hyperliquid at roughly $8 billion and $780 million of fees, Ethena at $1.8 billion and $430 million of revenue, and Pump at $1.6 billion and $650 million of commissions. Those implied multiples—about 10x, 4x, and 2.5x respectively—look preferable to a 380x Ethereum multiple in a macro downturn. His blunt call: ETH is “a great asset at a terrible price,” may resemble Cisco after the dot-com peak, and may never regain its all-time high.

Tron is the debate’s proof that L1 monetization is possible, though the speakers draw opposite lessons from it. The discussion cited roughly 35% of stablecoins, deep USDT distribution across Asia and Africa, and about $26 billion of value against $629 million of annual revenue, or about 41x sales. Haseeb credits Justin Sun but sees high fees as a rational attempt to monetize an advantage that may face competition from Tether, Tempo, Arc, or other entrants; Santiago warned that over-monetization can accelerate market-share loss.

Their common falsification test is real, persistent onchain economic activity rather than another burst of mercenary TVL. Santiago wants Western Union, Stripe, payments, credit, and operating businesses producing “real GDP on the network,” noting crypto has about 40 million active users versus ChatGPT’s cited 800 million. Haseeb wants steadily rising, durable capital and asset tokenization—still, in his telling, below 1% of M2—and believes investors are watching from the “front row” as finance moves onto permissionless rails.