Stablecoin Gold Rush: A $200 Trillion Opportunity | Rob Hadick
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All I would say is if stablecoins are inevitability at this point, and if you are building in fintech and or at a payment company and you aren't actively figuring out how do I future proof this business for stablecoins, you're gonna lose.
Welcome to Bankless, where we explore the frontier of Internet money and Internet finance. And today on Bankless, we are exploring the frontier of Stablecoins. The Stablecoin conversation in crypto goes all the way back. You can find discussions of Stablecoin concepts as far back as the Bitcoin talk forums, which was the original venue for all of crypto's great ideas. In 2025, the conversation continues. Stablecoins have been and seemingly always will be an incredibly important part of the crypto revolution. Things are a little different now, however, in 2025. Things are no longer conceptual.
for having me.
Rob, I'm gonna start this episode by reading off a quote and then maybe you can just pick up the trail right from there. Stablecoins aren't going to be the best product for all forms of payments, collateral, mobility, savings, etcetera, but they are better and will continue to get better for many, many use cases eating into that trillions of dollars of the addressable market. Now this is a quote from you. Maybe you could just expand on that and overall just, you know, set the table for us when we get into the conversation of stablecoins, where we are now, where things are going, and why people
Yeah. Listen. The stablecoin topic is, like, not a new one. People have been talking about this for a long period of time. Circle's existence since 2012. And there's been a lot of conversation around stablecoins that I don't think has made a ton of sense. But what we've really started to see in the last year is people kind of formulate or understand where are the places where Stablecoins are the most exciting. So, you know, when I put that quote out there, you know, a lot of people have talked about, oh, like, merchant payments in Stablecoins or know, domestic payments. And we haven't seen tha
Mhmm. I think what people are learning right now, especially with the election of the recent administration, which is of course much more crypto friendly, which means that we're gonna get some crypto friendly legislation pushed through congress, which is definitely the backdrop of why people are talking about stable coins right now. People are looking at how crypto is going to become, you know, regulatory compliant, regulatorily clear. And I think people are realizing that stable coins are just a first step into traditional finance, you know, the rest of the world's foray into crypto. The firs
So I think it's helpful to maybe frame this as, like, what is a stablecoin? Because what I think in crypto happens is we talk a lot about stablecoins for different types of products that are clearly not stablecoins or stablecoins for different use cases. So, you know, you mentioned Circle and Tether, very traditional, you know, treasury backed or almost treasury backed in Tether's case, stablecoins that are meant to be for payment use cases. So you mentioned the Genius Act or the Stable Bill here in The US. They specifically talk about these payment stablecoins. Mika has the same thing, essent
savings vehicle.
Yeah. Exactly. Savings vehicle. Same thing. Mhmm. Then you also have stablecoins that are more crypto native that maybe are, you know, some sort of, like, tokenized, you know, cash and carry trade like an Athena or, you know, a part of that plus they have USTB, so it's BIDL, where it's meant to be more of a, you know, call it, lik
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