Dragonfly's Haseeb Qureshi: The Biggest Digital Assets Bull Market Has Started (Here's How I’m Positioned)

Haseeb Qureshi sees on-chain perpetuals as an expanding market after Hyperliquid demonstrated that decentralized venues can deliver the user experience, latency, and performance needed to compete. He described crypto perps as roughly 1% of global derivatives markets, suggesting substantial room to grow, though the first source of share may be centralized crypto exchanges rather than traditional financial markets. Hyperliquid has become a meaningful share of Binance’s total volume, and its relative volume versus Binance has historically risen even when activity on both venues falls with crypto volume and volatility.

Dragonfly owns Hyperliquid and invested early in Lighter and Variational, which take different approaches to on-chain trading; Variational uses an RFQ model. Qureshi described the opportunity in layers: smaller venues such as Lighter competing with Hyperliquid, on-chain perps taking share from Binance and OKX, and crypto venues eventually competing with Nasdaq, CME, and Interactive Brokers. He cited Lighter’s fully diluted valuation at about $4–5 billion and said Variational had not yet held its token generation event. Which projects grow will depend on market development, liquidity, awareness, and the quality of each venue’s product and go-to-market execution.

Real-world assets already account for more than 50% of Hyperliquid’s volume, Qureshi said, but activity in WTI, gold, and SK Hynix remains small relative to those assets’ broader markets. Weekend and holiday trading can attract attention by enabling price discovery when traditional venues are closed; a larger opportunity would be decentralized venues becoming part of day-to-day price discovery. He also noted that spot trading in mature traditional markets is about 20% of derivatives trading, a contrast with crypto’s derivatives-heavy activity.

Qureshi favors perps over tokenization over roughly the next year, while allowing that tokenization could overtake perps over a five-year horizon. Perps fit short-term directional trading because they offer leverage, settle in cash, and do not require holding inventory of the underlying asset. Tokenization better suits long-term saving, particularly when a token conveys genuine ownership or governance rights rather than synthetic exposure; that real ownership also brings additional regulatory considerations. He expects fintech services, especially in emerging markets, to bring more savers on-chain for diversified stock and bond portfolios, although crypto-native activity is currently dominated by short-term trading and on-chain stock investing remains niche.

Vaults have clear product-market fit, but Qureshi sees their defensibility as a challenge: when providers offer the same underlying yield and redemption assurances, users can switch based on price, and issuers may capture more of the value. Tokenized assets have stronger economies of scale because users prefer the most liquid version, while fragmentation makes assets more costly to trade and move. He also sees stablecoins, prediction markets, and crypto’s intersection with AI as investment opportunities alongside perps and tokenization, and said regulation could shift from a headwind to a tailwind for perps.

Dragonfly invests on a two-to-three-year horizon rather than positioning only for the current market cycle; Qureshi cited investing in Lighter before Hyperliquid’s breakout and Polymarket before the 2024 election. On prediction markets, he said state disputes over gaming licenses and taxes are colliding with markets’ argument that federal oversight preempts state rules. Courts have split, and he expects the Supreme Court to take up the issue and divide authority between federal and state regulators. He characterized New York’s action against Polymarket as a licensing and tax dispute, not proof that the activity cannot be conducted. Dragonfly is also invested in NEAR, which Qureshi linked to simplifying cross-chain activity through account abstraction, and Zcash, whose resurgence he tied to renewed interest in privacy as crypto institutionalizes; he said he personally invested in Zodal, a Zcash wallet.