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Dragonfly's Hadick: Stablecoin Winners Won't Be Issuers
Dragonfly's Rob Hadick says stablecoin value will shift from issuers to companies owning distribution, compliance, and payment flows as the legacy stack collapses.
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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.