
Dragonfly's Rob Hadick says stablecoin value will shift from issuers to companies owning distribution, compliance, and payment flows as the legacy stack collapses.
The stablecoin market's first fortune was a reserve-yield business. Issue the token, hold the Treasuries, collect the interest. Tether and Circle built the dominant versions of that model. Dragonfly Capital's Rob Hadick argues the next phase will look nothing like it.
Hadick sees the real value shifting toward distribution, compliance, and the collapse of the traditional payment rails. The shift is structural, not incremental.
"Stablecoins collapse the legacy payment infrastructure and reduce the dependency on intermediaries," Hadick said. "When you're a stablecoin native, everything is just a book transfer."
That changes where the money goes. In the legacy system, value spread across banks, card networks, processors, settlement layers, and compliance vendors. Stablecoins compress that stack. A company that issues its own stablecoin, serves users directly, handles merchant settlement, and runs identity and fraud checks on an open ledger can skip the issuing bank, the merchant bank, and the card network.
"You don't need both an issuing and merchant bank," Hadick said. "You don't need the card network if the merchant and consumer are already known to the provider. You don't need the network to facilitate clearing and settlement."
Hadick described the change as an inversion of the 2010s fintech playbook. That era produced companies that connected startups to bank rails. The stablecoin era produces companies that make bank rails optional.
The largest issuers already see the shift coming. Both Tether and Circle have started investing heavily in moving from asset management models to payment models, Hadick noted. Tether has backed companies like Whop, Transfi, and Plasma. Circle launched the Circle Payments Network and Arc. Issuance was the first business model. The second is owning the flow.
Hadick is skeptical of platforms that sit in the middle, connecting third-party services without taking on compliance or operational risk. He described that group as the "Plaid for stablecoins" model.
"They call themselves Plaid for stablecoins, forgetting that blockchains already solve many of the original pain points Plaid solved for traditional banking," he said.
That critique has a direct investment implication. If a company is only wrapping APIs, it may charge high fees today. The margins are vulnerable. To hold value when the market matures, platforms need to own the compliance layer, the customer relationship, and the liquidity.
Consumer fintech carries a similar exposure. Stablecoin infrastructure makes it easy to launch a neobank or payment app. Established brands like Nubank, Robinhood, and Revolut can add stablecoin features to an existing user base. New startups need a strong distribution wedge or a specific regional use case to stand out. Hadick expects failure rates in that category to be high, though a small number of winners could build large global businesses.
Two numbers support Hadick's bullish case. Filtered stablecoin transaction velocity hit a record 49.7 times annualized, suggesting usage is accelerating beyond crypto trading. McKinsey estimates stablecoins now account for roughly 3% of cross-border payments, up from almost nothing a year earlier. Hadick expects that share to rise sharply.
"Stablecoins are here to stay," he said. "I think they're going to grow tenfold."
For traders tracking the thesis, the question is which layer captures the margin. The bull case favors compliant infrastructure platforms that take real operational responsibility and face customers directly. The bear case targets middleware that depends on the same legacy rails stablecoins intend to replace.
Hadick's investment map is not about who issues the token. It is about who owns the flow.
Prepared with AlphaScala research tooling and grounded in primary market data: live prices, fundamentals, SEC filings, hedge-fund holdings, and insider activity. Each story is checked against AlphaScala publishing rules before release. Educational coverage, not personalized advice.