Dragonfly GP Rob Hadick: Stablecoins Could Grow 10x

Rob Hadick, a general partner at Dragonfly, predicts stablecoins could grow tenfold as businesses and consumers adopt them for payments. He expects the shift to reduce reliance on traditional payment rails and move economic value to firms that manage distribution, compliance and merchant settlement.

Hadick argues the market has moved beyond issuance and reserve yield as the main sources of value. Early stablecoin issuers accumulated liquidity and earned interest on reserves. He says the next phase will be driven by payments, distribution and regulatory infrastructure rather than reserve returns.

He described how stablecoins change settlement. Hadick argued: “Stablecoins collapse the legacy payment infrastructure and reduce the dependency on intermediaries.” Settlement and transfers can become native entries on a ledger instead of processes routed through banks and card networks, he said.

If settlement becomes ledger-native, roles for issuing banks, merchant banks, card networks, processors and some clearinghouses could shrink. Hadick described scenarios where merchants and consumers transact by updating balances on a shared ledger, reducing the need for multiple intermediaries.

Hadick pointed to actions by large issuers as evidence of a shift. He cited Tether’s investments in firms such as Whop, Transfi, Rumble and Plasma, and Circle’s launch of the Circle Payments Network and Arc. He framed those moves as issuers moving from an asset-management model toward payment rails and settlement services.

The competitive battleground, Hadick said, will be at the edges of the stack. Companies that control customer distribution, merchant relationships, identity verification, fraud detection and compliance workflows-and that take operational responsibility for settlement-stand to capture a larger share of revenue. He suggested some firms may issue their own stablecoins and handle merchant settlement directly on-chain.

Hadick warned that aggregated API platforms that only connect third-party services without owning compliance or operations may face margin pressure. He compared some offerings to a “Plaid for stablecoins” and added that blockchains already address many issues those middleware tools were built to solve. On consumer fintech, he noted that incumbents such as Nubank, Robinhood and Revolut could add stablecoin payments to existing user bases, increasing competition for new entrants.

He cited an estimate that stablecoins rose to about 3% of cross-border payments after being negligible a year earlier, and repeated his forecast that the asset class could expand tenfold. Hadick framed issuance and reserve yield as the opening act and identified firms that own last-mile distribution and compliance as the likely long-term participants in the emerging payments stack.