Agora, a startup founded by entrepreneur and VanEck heir Nick van Eck, is positioning itself for a stable market that goes beyond crypto-native trading.
While decentralized finance (DeFi) remains a key growth driver – Agora’s total value locked (TVL) increased 60% in the last month since DeFi launches, he said – its attention is turning to a longer-term bet: enterprise payments powered by stablecoins.
“We spend a lot of time on payroll, business-to-business and cross-border payments. Problems that actual businesses actually need to solve,” van Eck, who will speak at CoinDesk’s Consensus conference in Hong Kong next month, said in a recent interview.
He believes that adoption by traditional businesses is inevitable but slow, delayed by unfamiliar infrastructure, lack of internal policies and gaps in basic education. “If the knowledge of stablecoins in the crypto world is one hundred,” he said, then outside of that, it’s “five.”
Agora issues AUSD, a stablecoin backed by the US dollar, and also offers stablecoin as a service for crypto projects wanting to create 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.”
According to van Eck, the biggest opportunity lies in replacing cumbersome cross-border payment systems, where pre-financing and transaction costs eat into companies’ 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 enterprise chains like Circle’s Arc, Coinbase’s Base or Stripe’s Tempo moving their businesses away from open source blockchains. “You will see consolidation into 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 issuers of stablecoins – and to win by creating tools that businesses actually know how to use.
“They don’t want crypto,” van Eck said. “They want something that’s like a bank account, but better.”
