Agora is a startup founded by entrepreneur and VanEck successor Nick Van Eck that is positioning itself for the stablecoin market beyond crypto-native trading.
While decentralized finance (DeFi) remains a key growth engine, Agora’s Total Value Locked (TVL) grew 60% last month due to DeFi launches, he said. He said he is shifting his focus to corporate payments using stablecoins, a long-term bet.
“We spend a lot of time on payroll, business-to-business transactions, cross-border payments. These are problems that real companies actually need to solve,” said Van Eck, who will be speaking at CoinDesk’s Consensus Hong Kong conference next month.
He believes adoption by traditional companies is inevitable but slowed by unfamiliar infrastructure, lack of internal policies and gaps in basic education. “If my knowledge of stablecoins in the crypto world is 100, everything else is 5,” he said.
Agora issues AUSD, a stablecoin backed by the US dollar, and also offers stablecoin-as-a-service for crypto projects that want to mint their own branded tokens. But Van Eck doesn’t recommend that to most people. “It only makes sense if you have a closed-loop ecosystem,” he said. “Otherwise, use a major stablecoin.”
Van Eck argued that the bigger opportunity lies in replacing clunky cross-border payment systems, where up-front financing and transaction costs cut into companies’ profits. “If you save 1% on sales, you could save 5% on EBITDA,” he said. Who is most likely to be an early adopter? Multinational companies with global vendor networks.
Looking ahead, Van Eck sees corporate chains like Circle’s Arc, Coinbase’s Base, and Stripe’s Tempo pulling their activities away from open source blockchains. He predicted that large companies would bring “the money, the firepower, the distribution” and “they would be consolidated into fewer chains.”
In this increasingly competitive landscape, Agora’s goal is to become one of the top five stablecoin issuers in the world, and to win by building tools that businesses actually know how to use.
“They don’t want cryptocurrencies,” Van Eck said. “They want something that feels like a bank account, but more than that.”
