Agora, a startup founded by entrepreneur and VanEck heir Nick van Eck, is positioning itself for a stable coin market that moves beyond crypto-native trading.
While decentralized finance (DeFi) remains a key growth engine — Agora’s total value locked (TVL) grew 60% last month from DeFi launches, he said — his focus is shifting toward a longer-term effort: stablecoin-powered enterprise payments.
“We spend a lot of time on cross-pay, business-to-business, cross-border payments. Problems that real businesses actually need to solve,” van Eck, who will speak at CoinDesk’s Consensus Hong Kong conference next month, said in a recent interview.
He believes traditional business adoption is inevitable but slow, delayed by unfamiliar infrastructure, lack of internal policies and deficiencies in basic training. “If stablecoin knowledge in the crypto world is a hundred,” he said, then outside is “a five.”
Agora issues AUSD, a US dollar-backed stablecoin, and also offers stablecoin-as-a-service to crypto projects that want to mint their own branded tokens. But van Eck does not recommend it for most people. “It only makes sense if you have a closed ecosystem,” he said. “Otherwise you need a bigger stablecoin.”
The bigger opportunity, van Eck argued, lies in replacing clunky cross-border payment systems where pre-financing and transaction costs eat away at companies’ margins. “If they save 1% on revenue, it 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 pulling activity away from open source blockchains. “You’ll see consolidation in a handful of chains,” he predicted, as big firms bring “money, firepower and distribution.”
In this increasingly competitive landscape, Agora’s ambition is to be one of the top five global stablecoin issuers – and to win by building tools that businesses actually know how to use.
“They don’t want crypto,” van Eck said. “They want something that feels like a bank account, but better.”
