In just one year, why is the capital logic of Agora willing to pay for two rounds of financing?

Agora raised $50 million in funding, behind which lies the unfinished battle in the institutional stablecoin market.

Written by: ChandlerZ, Foresight News

On July 10, stablecoin company Agora announced the completion of a $50 million Series A funding round, led by the crypto venture capital firm Paradigm, with early investors such as Dragonfly also participating. This round of financing comes just a year after their seed round completed in 2024, which raised a total of $12 million, with investors including Foresight Ventures, Hack VC, and Galaxy Digital.

Currently, the stablecoin market is dominated by leading projects such as Tether and Circle, while Agora is still in its early stages, with a circulating market value of its core product AUSD at approximately 160 million USD. Although the industry landscape is concentrated and the regulatory environment is becoming clearer, the issuance model proposed by the company still attracts capital attention. For institutions, in addition to factors such as product feasibility and service stability, whether there are new entry points for stablecoins has also become one of the key factors for evaluation.

Overview of Agora

Agora was established in 2023 and is headquartered in the United States, focusing on providing infrastructure related to stablecoins. The first product, AUSD, adopts a 1:1 minting model, with cash, short-term U.S. Treasury bonds, and overnight repurchase agreements as reserve assets. The company serves enterprises and institutions, offering issuance, clearing, and custody capabilities for stablecoins, and does not directly target end-users.

In terms of product strategy, Agora has established an issuance framework based on AUSD, allowing partners to issue their own branded stablecoins based on this framework. This approach avoids reliance on the Agora brand, enabling partners to retain profit distribution and operational control. Technically, AUSD supports deployment on mainstream chains such as Ethereum and Solana, with the contract layer implementing various functional expansions, including permission control, signature verification, and privacy transmission.

At the service application layer, Agora provides a conversion channel between AUSD and mainstream stablecoins (USDC, USDT), offering all-day liquidity interfaces for certain institutional clients. As of now, the on-chain transaction count of AUSD has exceeded 8 million, with a cumulative trading volume of over 12 billion dollars, and the number of registered users is approximately 55,000, with more than 100 partner institutions. Currently, circulation is mainly on-chain, with usage concentrated on certain decentralized trading platforms and payment scenarios.

From a market positioning perspective, Agora is closer to the Paxos model, focusing on institutional cooperation. However, unlike Paxos, which issues independent stablecoins for partners, Agora's partners' products are all pegged to AUSD and share underlying liquidity. This approach maintains brand independence while also making internal network assets interchangeable, which is beneficial for liquidity management and technical integration.

Team Background

Agora was co-founded by Nick van Eck, Drake Evans, and Joe McGrady, who serve as the Chief Executive Officer (CEO), Chief Technology Officer (CTO), and Chief Operating Officer (COO) respectively. According to public information, the current team size of the company is under 10 people.

Nick van Eck was a partner at General Catalyst, focusing on investment opportunities in enterprise software and cryptocurrency. He previously worked at JMI Equity, participating in several large transaction projects, and graduated from the University of Virginia.

Drake Evans is responsible for technical architecture and contract development, and was involved in the construction of modules related to Frax Finance in the early years, including projects like Fraxlend, Fraxswap, and frxETH, with contract peak management assets exceeding 1 billion dollars. He previously worked on payment system performance optimization in a team under ADP and has relevant experience in compliance system development.

Joe McGrady is responsible for the company's operations. Before joining Agora, he was the Global Head of Operations at Galaxy Digital, where he participated in trading, lending, asset management, and the organizational development of infrastructure, and was also responsible for the onboarding processes of projects such as Fireblocks. He has held key positions at Ospraie Management and its derivatives company ParkRiver, engaging in institutional due diligence, operational management, and other related work for an extended period.

Overall, the team members have backgrounds spanning venture capital, blockchain protocol development, and traditional financial operations, possessing the foundational conditions to drive institutional-grade products.

Product Layout: Three Main Strategic Lines

Agora currently builds its service system with three product lines, covering stablecoin issuance, liquidity management, and multi-chain network deployment, attempting to address core issues in the current stablecoin application such as compliance transparency, fund scheduling, and cross-chain usage.

The first product line is the AUSD stablecoin itself, with its asset reserves primarily composed of short-term U.S. Treasury bonds and cash, and supervised by a third-party custodian. It has certain transparency disclosure and auditing arrangements. This asset structure can meet the regulatory requirements for stablecoin products in some regions and reduce the credit risk associated with the opacity of reserve assets.

The second product line is the "Instant Liquidity" service. Agora has established a conversion mechanism with stablecoins such as USDC and USDT, allowing institutional users to complete asset conversions across multiple chains with low latency. This feature is provided through the Atlas interface, aiming to reduce the usage friction caused by liquidity layering while enhancing the capital utilization efficiency of cross-chain assets.

The third product line is the stablecoin issuance network and white label platform. Agora supports multi-chain deployment and can bridge partner products to centralized and decentralized trading platforms. Enterprise clients can issue localized stablecoins according to their needs, and the system provides corresponding clearing, custody, and brand support capabilities. This platform structure enhances partner autonomy and also strengthens the overall network's adaptability and synergy.

Summary

Against the backdrop of the gradual maturation of the stablecoin market and the increasingly differentiated user demands, capital has begun to focus on the adjustment space of product models and service boundaries. The cooperative issuance structure adopted by Agora focuses on corporate users and institutional scenarios, with a relatively clear target, reducing direct overlap with leading projects in the terminal market.

The current financing also indicates that the capital market still holds interest in exploring such models, especially against the backdrop of a gradually forming policy framework, where institutions are more inclined to focus on projects with regulatory adaptability and expansion potential. For the stablecoin industry, Agora's attempt provides a possible path that balances standardization and customization, targeting institutions and relying on underlying networks, which may become a reference model in the future development process of stablecoins.