Rob Hadick Warns Tether and Circle Face Rising Pressure From New Stablecoins

Dragonfly’s Rob Hadick Says the USDT-USDC Duopoly Won’t Survive the Next Wave

The stablecoin market may look concentrated today, but some investors believe its structure is only temporary. Rob Hadick, General Partner at crypto venture firm Dragonfly, argues that the next wave of stablecoin growth will be driven less by issuance and reserve income and more by payments, distribution, compliance, and real-world financial activity.

In his view, the industry is still in its early stages, with new entrants ranging from banks and fintechs to crypto-native issuers positioning themselves to challenge the dominance of USDT and USDC.

“It’s inevitable that the stablecoin space will continue to get more competitive,” he said. “We will not be in a duopoly years from now.” The pressure is coming from multiple directions.

Traditional financial institutions are exploring stablecoins. Fintechs are embedding them into existing products. New issuers are designing more flexible tokens. There have also been rumors of consortium-style efforts involving major payments players such as Visa and Mastercard.

Breaking the duopoly will not happen along a single dimension. It may not immediately show up in market capitalization. Instead, challengers may first gain ground through transaction volume, merchant adoption, regional dominance, or specific business flows.

Hadick sees particular vulnerability on the merchant and business distribution side. If new entrants can place their stablecoins inside real payment flows, adoption and volume could grow faster than market cap.

Tether and Circle’s Weak Spots

USDT and USDC each have strengths, but Hadick sees vulnerabilities across regulation, geography, yield, distribution, and product experience.

For Tether, regulatory pressure remains a challenge in certain parts of the world. For the broader market, yield sharing has become a contested issue. Banks may resist it, but many users globally have come to expect some form of economic participation.

Product experience is another open field. Stablecoins are still difficult for many mainstream users and businesses to access, move, reconcile, and integrate into existing workflows. That creates space for challengers that make the experience simpler, safer, and more commercially useful.

Geography may be especially important. Hadick noted that stablecoins are already being used in major remittance corridors such as the U.S. to India and the U.S. to Mexico. However, if a challenger builds superior infrastructure in those corridors, it could begin to chip away at Tether’s position in emerging markets, where USDT remains deeply entrenched.

The Challenger Advantage

The next generation of stablecoins may have advantages that incumbents cannot easily copy. According to Hadick, the biggest one is incentive alignment combined with infrastructure flexibility.

A new issuer can design from scratch around institutional backing, full collateralization, cross-chain DeFi support, commercial customization, and regulatory positioning. That gives challengers room to target specific use cases without inheriting every constraint of the current market structure.

Hadick pointed to companies such as Paxos and Agora as examples of players developing more flexible and composable stablecoin solutions. These products may be optimized for savings, collateral mobility, FX settlement, or other specialized financial use cases.

The path will not be easy. Liquidity remains hard to build, and distribution is even harder. But if a new issuer finds a foothold in a specific corridor, platform, or business workflow, it can potentially expand from there.

Neutral Issuers Still Matter

As banks, fintechs, crypto-native companies, and large platforms enter the market, a key question is whether stablecoins become closed-loop products or neutral financial infrastructure.

Hadick still believes neutral non-bank and fintech-issued stablecoins can win a significant share. He reasons that competitive dynamics make it difficult for closed systems to transact with one another without a credible neutral party in the middle.

That is why the evolution of issuers such as Circle, Tether, Paxos, and Agora matters. They are no longer simply issuing tokens. They are expanding into payments, fintech infrastructure, and global financial services.

Governments are a different matter. Hadick views government-issued stablecoins as closer to central bank digital currencies, a separate product category with different trust, privacy, and programmability tradeoffs. In his view, stablecoins and CBDCs should not be treated as the same thing.

The more likely future is not one stablecoin replacing all others. It is a proliferation of purpose-built tokens. Some will be built for savings. Others will prioritize speed, compliance, settlement, liquidity, or regional payment flows. Most will fail. The ones that survive will need more than a ticker and a reserve account. They will need distribution, trust, liquidity, regulatory clarity, and a reason to exist.

The USDT-USDC duopoly may remain powerful in the near term, but Hadick sees competition as inevitable. Banks, fintechs, crypto-native issuers, and neutral infrastructure providers are all moving toward the same opportunity.

As stated in a previous article, “We’re still maybe 5% of the way there,” Hadick said. That may be the clearest summary of the stablecoin market today.