Dragonfly’s Tom Schmidt sees synthetic dollars growing alongside tokenized assets

Tom Schmidt, General Partner at crypto venture firm Dragonfly, has a fairly simple thesis for where on-chain money goes next. As more real-world assets get tokenized, he says, synthetic dollars will grow right along with them. He made the case at Korea Blockchain Week 2026 in Seoul. The conference ran from September 29 to October 1 and spent much of its stage time on tokenization, stablecoins and policy. What Schmidt said in Seoul Schmidt’s core point was about linkage. In his view, the expansion of real-world assets (RWAs) on blockchains and the expansion of synthetic dollars are not separate stories but connected ones. A real-world asset, in crypto terms, is something that exists off-chain, like a bond or a fund share, represented by a token on a blockchain. A synthetic dollar is a token built to hold a value of one dollar, constructed from other assets and positions rather than relying purely on cash sitting in a bank account. Schmidt’s argument, as presented at the event, is that more tokenized ingredients mean more possible recipes. If bonds, funds and other traditional instruments live on-chain, the toolkit for building dollar-pegged products gets bigger. As of October 1, 202...