Announcing Dragonfly Fund II
Today, we’re excited to announce the launch of Dragonfly Fund II, a $225M venture fund, to back the next generation of crypto entrepreneurs and projects.
We started Dragonfly with the vision that unlike traditional companies, decentralized technologies are global from day one. There is no such thing as an American or Chinese protocol — the moment a protocol is launched, its users span the world. Crypto is borderless and global by its nature.
We believe a modern crypto investment firm should reflect that.
This philosophy is realized by the entrepreneurs we back. We’ve been lucky enough to partner with some of the top minds across both the East and the West, building crypto infrastructure, decentralized protocols, and breakthrough consumer applications. And we work tirelessly with the projects we partner with to help build a bridge between the Western and Asian communities.
In our Fund II, we are excited to have Sequoia China joining us as a strategic LP. We have also partnered with some of the premiere Asian platforms, including OKEx, Huobi, Bitmain, and Bybit. Together with many of the technology and cultural leaders from US technology firms and VCs, we’re in an incredible position to help unite and push the crypto movement forward.
We’re going to continue our global-first approach as we work with the best teams across the East and the West, and we’re looking for people to help us build this vision.
Yes, we’re hiring! Check out our open positions on AngelList and reach out to us at jobs@dcp.capital (or apply directly on AngelList). We’re currently looking for crypto-native additions to our research and investment team, as well as people with fund operations experience (particularly in Singapore, or willing to relocate). If you or someone you know would be a good fit, please reach out!
Since we originally began investing in the crypto landscape, a lot has changed. Here’s a preview of some of the directions we’re excited about exploring in our Fund II:
Decentralized Finance
We’ve been supporting and investing in DeFi before the term was invented. With DeFi, financial services will become as accessible, transparent, and programmable as the Internet itself. A parallel financial universe has emerged, complete with its own trading venues, lenders, underwriters, and boardrooms. DeFi has grown by orders of magnitude in users and volume, but it’s still constrained by primitive infrastructure. Put another way, we’re still in the MS-DOS phase of DeFi — what comes next, and what does the next wave of infrastructure unlock?
NFTs and Monetization for Creators
NFTs present a new paradigm for creatives to create, distribute, and monetize their works. With NFTs, users can own digital-native properties and creators can unlock a collector base that is global from day one.
How creators monetize has been radically upended over the last decade. Traditional monetization methods, such as selling media or auctioning off ad space, simply don’t make sense for new media formats. How will NFTs solve this problem? NFTs are frothy right now, but it’s clear now they’re an important component of the digital future.
Layer 2
Ethereum is now so congested as to be unusable for most people. Meanwhile, the Layer 2 ecosystem has matured a lot since the early days of federated sidechains and vanilla state channels. We’re looking for teams that are continuing to innovate in this space, combining technical breakthroughs with real go-to-market and a mind towards adoption.
Of course, that doesn’t just mean literally building a Layer 2: we’re also looking for the tools and businesses that will be built on top of them. If Layer 2 is the way that blockchains scale going forward, this is perhaps the most important architectural shift of the next several years. Technological paradigm shifts always lead to the birth of great businesses.
Centralized Financial Infrastructure
Our “CeFi” investments date back to before the inception of Dragonfly: we were among the earliest investors in some of the world’s largest exchanges. Many investors try to map the crypto market infrastructure onto traditional — who will be the Goldman Sachs, the State Street, the NYSE of crypto? (Perhaps the namesakes themselves?) But metaphors only go so far. We believe most impactful crypto finance companies will be built from first principles and reimagine how crypto and capital markets intertwine.
And then there are all the new discoveries we haven’t even imagined yet. If you’re doing something new, we want to hear about it. Reach out: hello@dcp.capital.
See you on-chain, crypto cowboy.
