Agora, a startup founded by entrepreneur and VanEck heir Nick van Eck, is positioning itself for a stablecoin market that goes beyond cryptocurrency trading.
While decentralized finance (DeFi) remains a key growth driver (Agora’s total value locked (TVL) grew 60% last month since DeFi launches, it said), its focus is shifting to a longer-term bet: enterprise payments powered by stablecoins.
“We spend a lot of time on payroll, cross-border payments, and cross-border payments. Problems that real businesses really need to solve,” van Eck, who will speak at CoinDesk’s Consensus Hong Kong conference next month, said in a recent interview.
He believes adoption by traditional companies is inevitable but slow, delayed by unknown infrastructure, lack of internal policies and gaps in basic education. “If the knowledge of stablecoins in the cryptocurrency world is one hundred,” he said, then there are “five” out there.
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 it for most. “It only makes sense if you have a closed-loop ecosystem,” he said. “Otherwise, use a major stablecoin.”
The biggest opportunity, van Eck argued, lies in replacing outdated cross-border payment systems, where pre-financing and transaction costs eat into corporate margins. “If they save 1% on revenue, that could be 5% on EBITDA,” he said. The most likely early adopters? Multinational companies with global supplier networks.
Looking ahead, van Eck sees corporate chains like Circle’s Arc, Coinbase’s Base or Stripe’s Tempo moving activity away from open source blockchains. “We’ll see consolidation in a handful of chains,” he predicted, as big companies bring in “money, firepower and distribution.”
In this increasingly competitive landscape, Agora’s ambition is to be one of the top five global stablecoin issuers and win by creating tools that businesses actually know how to use.
“They don’t want cryptocurrencies,” van Eck said. “They want something that looks like a bank account, but better.”
