#237 Alex Pack - Partner at Dragonfly Capital on Why ETH is Money

— Alex Pack leads Dragonfly Capital, a global crypto venture firm with partners in San Francisco and Beijing, investing across tokens, DeFi protocols, and infrastructure companies in both Western and Asian markets.

— The crypto ecosystem is fundamentally global and Asia-driven; 75% of crypto unicorns are Asia-based, with retail users in developing regions needing crypto for credit access and currency alternatives unavailable in traditional finance.

— DeFi represents the application of triple-entry accounting to financial systems, enabling permissionless lending and collateralization at scale; Dragonfly backed MakerDAO and other protocols like Compound and dYdX.

— Ethereum's monetary policy is decided by developer consensus and can change for security reasons (proof-of-stake transition), making it structurally similar to fiat currencies; Bitcoin's fixed supply and programmatic policy offer a different tradeoff.

— DAI (a stablecoin) rather than ETH is closer to functioning as money today; stablecoins will likely be the primary medium of exchange for crypto users over the next decade.

— Security tokenization of real assets—particularly mortgages, HELOCs, and securities—will eventually digitize every financial asset class; Figure Technologies has originated more HELOCs than total DeFi value locked through blockchain-based settlement infrastructure.

— Evaluate crypto assets on their intended use case rather than blanket comparisons: Bitcoin optimizes for immutability and consensus stability (sound money), while Ethereum optimizes for developer velocity and on-chain experimentation (infrastructure). Infrastructure innovation will eventually migrate from Ethereum to Bitcoin once proven.

— Focus investment attention on decentralized infrastructure and tokenized financial assets (mortgages, securities, derivatives) replacing legacy settlement infrastructure rather than enterprise blockchain for operational efficiency—the former creates trillion-dollar markets, the latter yields marginal gains.