Dragonfly General Partner Tom Schmidt argued at Korea Blockchain Week 2026 in Seoul that synthetic dollars will expand in step with tokenized real-world assets, framing the two sectors as a single connected market rather than parallel stories.

The conference, held from September 29 to October 1 in Seoul, devoted much of its program to tokenization, stablecoins and policy. Schmidt, a general partner at the crypto venture firm that backed Ethena's synthetic dollar protocol USDe in 2023, presented a directional thesis rather than a forecast: as more bonds, funds and other traditional instruments come on-chain, the toolkit available for constructing dollar-pegged tokens grows accordingly.

A real-world asset, in crypto terms, is an off-chain instrument — a bond, a fund share — represented by a token on a blockchain. A synthetic dollar is a token engineered to hold a value of one dollar, built from other assets and positions rather than from cash held in a bank account. Schmidt's argument rests on linkage: more tokenized ingredients mean more possible recipes for dollar-pegged products.

As of October 1, 2026, no direct quotes or full transcripts from his session had been published, and he offered no numerical projections or target dates. The claim is a directional call about market structure, not a spreadsheet.

Schmidt's position carries weight because Dragonfly has capital deployed in exactly this design. The firm invested in Ethena in 2023, before USDe became one of the most prominent synthetic dollar implementations. His Seoul remarks align the fund's thesis with the broader institutional push toward tokenizing traditional instruments.

He was one voice among many at the event. Tether and Ripple appeared alongside regulatory representatives, with sessions covering RWA tokenization, mainstream stablecoins and South Korea's evolving digital asset policies. Institutional adoption ran through much of the agenda, including blockchain's role in cross-border payments. Coverage of the event stressed collaboration between policymakers and industry as a precondition for tokenization to advance.

A second theme was currency competition. Panel discussions addressed the balance between dollar-based stablecoins and offerings tied to local currencies — a question with direct relevance to Korean regulators weighing how domestic digital asset rules should treat foreign-pegged instruments.

For the stablecoin market, the takeaway is fragmentation by design. Fiat-backed tokens, synthetic dollars and local-currency stablecoins increasingly compete for the same role: the default unit of on-chain settlement. Each carries a distinct risk profile. Synthetic dollars rely on assets and positions rather than simple cash reserves, so their stability depends on how well those underlying components hold up under stress — precisely the kind of structural detail regulators tend to scrutinize when evaluating whether a token qualifies as a payment instrument or a complex structured product.

For investors, the research circulating around the event points to tokenized assets as a potential source of new liquidity and more varied exposure options. Whether synthetic dollars capture a meaningful share of on-chain settlement will depend less on venture theses and more on how regulators classify collateral-dependent pegs — and on whether tokenized RWA supply grows deep enough to support the construction strategies Schmidt described.