A Dragonfly Capital general partner partially walked back the attack on named investors. The founder responded by calling Schmidt a former backer turned hostile critic.
Tom Schmidt, a general partner at Dragonfly Capital, called Nova Markets “huge scammers” on Thursday, targeting the startup’s entire investor cohort in the same post.
The accusation came as a quote-tweet of Nova Markets’ June 4 fundraise announcement. Dragonfly, which closed a $650 million fourth fund in February, is one of the blockchain industry’s most prominent VC funds.
“Huge scammers btw,” Schmidt wrote. “Shame on everyone who did this round for not even doing a bare minimum of dd,” referring to due diligence.
Schmidt’s Partial Retreat
52 minutes later, Schmidt had walked part of his accusation back.
In a follow-up post, Schmidt said he had since learned that most of the investor names in the announcement were legacy relationships being rolled forward rather than representing new capital.
“I’m learning that most of the investor names here are old companies that are being rolled into this / not putting new capital in (which is also a classic bad faith maneuver by the team lol),” he wrote, “so apologies to VCs in this camp (@robotventures @wintermute_t others).”
Schmidt did not apologize to the full named cohort — which includes Cumberland, GSR, Greenfield Capital, hash3xyz, Bodhi Ventures, BigBrainVC, and Kairos Research — and did not retract or soften his characterization of the team.
Founder Responds
Minutes after Schmidt’s partial walk-back, Nova Markets founder Tiago Barbosa — posting as @tiagobnova — quote-tweeted Schmidt saying: “> invests in founder > disagrees with founder > talks shit about him instead > shits on all his cap table — hyperliquid.”
Schmidt said Dragonfly is not an investor in Valhalla and declined to comment further.
Neither Nova Markets nor Barbosa responded to a request for comment from The Defiant, sent over X messages.
Perps Exchange on Hyperliquid
Nova Markets is a perpetuals exchange deployed on Hyperliquid’s HIP-3 framework. HIP-3, activated on mainnet in October 2025, lets any team that stakes 500,000 HYPE deploy its own perpetuals exchange on Hyperliquid’s order-matching layer. Nova positions itself as a faster listing engine for novel markets: assets that centralized exchanges cannot easily list, including pre-IPO company perps, commodities, and foreign equity indices.
HYPE, Hyperliquid’s governance and staking token, traded about 20% below its all-time high of $75.51, with a market cap of roughly $17 billion. The Defiant reported on June 3 that HIP-3 builder-deployed markets cleared $62 billion in May volume.
Third-Party Allegations and Tiago’s Denial
An account posting as @0xNeptun alleged that Tiago had previously launched a project called @valhalla_defi on MegaETH, raised $1.5 million from investors, abandoned the project, and was now using capital from that prior raise to fund Nova Markets. To be sure, the pseudonymous account has 591 followers, a low-credibility source by the standards this publication applies to unverified claims.
Tiago responded: “i founded valhalla, the rest is not true.” He confirmed founding Valhalla but denied the abandonment claim and the allegation that Nova Markets is funded by redeployed Valhalla capital.
