SAN FRANCISCO — As AI soaks up headlines and venture dollars, some in crypto worry the industry missed a “ChatGPT moment” or is losing capital for good. Haseeb Qureshi, managing partner at crypto venture firm Dragonfly, disagrees — saying what looks like a rout is mostly markets doing what markets do.
Speaking with CoinDesk at NEARCON 2026, Qureshi pushed back on comparisons between AI’s viral consumer uptake and crypto’s slower, fee-driven adoption. “Less than 1% of AI users are paying,” he noted. “That means 99% are using the free tier. Crypto doesn’t have a free tier. There is no free Bitcoin. There’s no free Ethereum.” By his read, usage patterns are fundamentally different: roughly 80% of Americans have tried some form of AI, while about 15% have owned crypto — a gap that reflects product economics rather than demand.
Qureshi pointed to steady on-chain utility as evidence that crypto’s underlying fundamentals remain intact. Stablecoins, he said, continue to expand regardless of price swings — “stablecoin supply has been growing 50% year over year,” he said — a trajectory he called “exponential growth.”
Yes, venture money has tilted toward AI. But Qureshi framed that shift not as proof that crypto has failed but as a normal market correction. “Money is a leading indicator,” he said. “Human beings respond to money — they don’t respond to the reality on the ground.” After multiple drawdowns, crypto still represents roughly a $2 trillion asset class, and many projects scale with small teams. “We don’t have any 9,000-person companies like OpenAI — and that’s a good thing,” he said. “Crypto is incredibly high leverage as a technology. You don’t need very many people to build things that are world scale.”
For Qureshi, some of the current contraction is simply pruning after years of excess funding. “To the extent that there were too many people building too many things in crypto, the market’s correcting that. That’s capitalism doing its job,” he said. Dragonfly’s recent announcement of a $650 million fund underscores that view — a move Qureshi described as precisely the right time to double down. “Why would you want to double down when prices are high?” he asked. “If you’re raising money and deploying into all-time high prices, that’s when you should be nervous.”
On the prospect that AI will rescue crypto’s momentum, Qureshi was blunt: it won’t be an immediate salvation. Agents and AI-driven crypto use cases are “so far away — it’s going to take years,” he said. He warned against chasing whatever tech trend is hot, noting a recurring pattern of crypto appending tokens and layers to the latest buzzwords: “Chatbots are exciting? Great — we have chatbots with tokens. Agents are exciting? Great — you can buy the layer one for agents. As an investor, you just have to slow down.”
Qureshi also rejected narratives that crypto has capitulated to Wall Street or abandoned its roots. “There’s a lot of people saying crypto capitulated and became a tool of Wall Street. I think that’s stupid,” he said, arguing bitcoin and related tech accommodate a wide range of uses without one party crowding out others.
He attributed a lot of today’s pessimism to short time horizons and fatigue in a notoriously volatile market. From ETF-driven rallies to tariff-driven pullbacks, crypto has been through cycles repeatedly. “This idea that because prices are down, nobody’s going to use stablecoins anymore? Absurd,” he said.
Bottom line from Dragonfly’s managing partner: the industry hasn’t been replaced by AI, nor have its fundamentals collapsed — it is in a cycle that rewards patience. “Chill out,” he said. “It’s not a catastrophe.”
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