Cofounded by Nick van Eck—the son of the prominent investment management CEO Jan van Eck—along with crypto veterans Drake Evans and Joe McGrady, Agora is competing in an increasingly crowded space dominated by rivals including Circle and Tether.
“What we wanted to do is really something novel, which is start by building the network,” van Eck told Fortune. “We always had the view that we were going to do white-labeled issuance in a different way to how existing peers had done it.”
Even so, he told Fortune that the company’s focus will continue to be outside the U.S., where there is more demand for stablecoins due to the volatility of local currencies and the need for cross-border payments. “A lot of different financial institutions outside of the U.S., I would say, are looking more aggressively and will be quicker to move than some of the companies in the U.S.,” van Eck said. “A lot of companies in the US are talking about it because it’s the topic du jour.”
Unlike leading stablecoins like Tether and USDC, Agora is designed to share the yield of the dollar-like assets backing the stablecoin with its partners. “One of the things we believed in the very beginning was that stablecoins should be run like public goods, which to us meant the lion’s share of the revenue gets passed to the people who are providing value within this monetary network,” Evans told Fortune.
Updated to clarify Dragonfly’s investment in the Series A.
