Agora, a startup founded by entrepreneur and VanEck heir Nick van Eck, is positioning itself for a stablecoin market that’s moving 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 bet: stablecoin-powered enterprise payments.
“We’re spending a lot of time across payroll, business-to-business, cross-border payments. Problems real companies actually need to solve,” van Eck, who will be speaking at CoinDesk’s Consensus Hong Kong conference next month, said in a recent interview.
He believes adoption by traditional firms is inevitable but slow, delayed by unfamiliar infrastructure, lack of internal policies, and basic education gaps. “If stablecoin knowledge in the crypto world is a hundred,” he said, then outside of is “a five.”
Agora issues AUSD, a U.S. dollar-backed stablecoin, and also offers stablecoin-as-a-service for crypto projects wanting 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 bigger opportunity, van Eck argued, lies in replacing clunky cross-border payment systems, where pre-funding and transaction costs eat into corporate margins. “If they save 1% on revenue, that might be 5% on EBITDA,” he said. The most likely early adopters? Multinational firms with global vendor 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 into a handful of chains,” he predicted, as major 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 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.”