Dragonfly Research is Growing: Welcoming Tom and Ashwin
At Dragonfly Capital, we believe crypto is a new asset class that requires a completely unique skillset. It’s not just venture, it’s not just liquid markets, and it’s not just pure tech — it sits at the intersection of all of those domains. So in order to build a premier crypto investing firm, you need world-class people across multiple disciplines.
This is why we’ve increased our commitment to Dragonfly Research, a dedicated team that produces original research, shares our insights on the state of the industry, and supports our portfolio on navigating the technical problems in this space. By doubling down our commitment to research, we intend to help push the frontier of knowledge and support the development of the crypto ecosystem.
To that end, we’ve brought on two new junior partners: Tom Schmidt and Ashwin Ramachandran. They will both join us as investors and will be active contributors to Dragonfly Research alongside myself and our Research Partner, Ivan Bogatyy.
Tom was previously Head of Product at 0x, growing it into one of the largest decentralized exchange protocols on Ethereum. Prior to 0x, Tom was a Product Manager at Facebook and later at Instagram, building programmatic ads products that generate billions in revenue. Tom graduated from Stanford with a BS in Computer Science, and interned as a software engineer at Apple and Microsoft. He first became interested in cryptocurrency at Stanford after writing a paper on potential regulatory paths for Bitcoin in a technology ethics class. Tom is one of the foremost experts in DeFi, and will help us expand our DeFi investing practice. You can follow Tom on Twitter at @tomhschmidt.
Ashwin was previously an early engineer at ThunderCore, where he worked directly under Cornell professor Elaine Shi on the design and implementation of the core consensus protocol. Prior to ThunderCore, Ashwin graduated with high-distinction from Duke University where he majored in Computer Science. At Duke, Ashwin helped teach a course for second-year MBA students on blockchain technology and performed theoretical research on distributed systems and DAOs. He also interned at NASA and the Stanford School of Medicine. Ashwin will bring his expertise in protocols and cryptoeconomics to our portfolio companies. You can follow Ashwin at @ashwin___r.
Tom and Ashwin will join the research team alongside Ivan Bogatyy (@ivanbogatyy), our current Research Partner, who was formerly at Metastable Capital and Google Research. They have all worked at the forefront of their fields, pushing the boundaries of DeFi, consensus, and protocol security. We are excited to have them with us at Dragonfly, advancing the state of knowledge and helping support our network of entrepreneurs.
And of course, look forward to seeing more of them as active contributors to Dragonfly Research!
If you’re an entrepreneur working on something great in crypto, we’d always love to hear from you: hello@dcp.capital.
