Agora Finance:

Agora Finance is working hard to become the foundational infrastructure layer for institutional use of stablecoins. The firm positions its flagship asset, AUSD, as the first institutional-grade, freely tradable, and partner-focused digital dollar.

The key to Agora lies in its architecture, which is all about deep integrations with highly regulated Tradfi partners. Their reserve backing is managed through key partnerships, specifically, State Street which is tasked with cash custody and fund administration, and VanEck which manages the reserve assets.

Agora’s business model revolves around two primary products built atop the AUSD core. The Instant Liquidity solution provides 24/7 atomic conversion of AUSD into major stablecoins like USDC and USDT, resolving critical operational bottlenecks inherent to traditional banking. Complementing this is the White Label solution, which allows institutional partners to rapidly launch compliant, branded stablecoins while retaining control over the reserve yield, a model that Agora hopes is disruptive to the status quo.

Agora Finance’s mandate is founded upon the conviction that digital dollars represent a public good. The firm’s approach is thus defined by a "partner model," which prioritizes the utility and liquidity driven by other businesses and their end users, rather than competing directly with them.

Give your clients the tools to succeed and grow with them.

The team uses credible neutrality, wherein Agora focuses solely on providing the backbone infrastructure. By avoiding competition with its platform users, Agora is able to maximize adoption and integration across the ecosystem.

Agora has strong leadership. CEO Nick van Eck previously served as a partner at General Catalyst, bringing a background steeped in venture capital and investment management. CTO Drake Evans comes with a strong DeFi background, having been instrumental in the early days of Frax Finance. Finally, COO Joe McGrady is the veteran with 20 years of financial experience, most notably at Galaxy.

These three represent what many in our industry are trying to achieve: the merging of off-chain and on-chain finance.

AUSD is minted at a 1:1 ratio with USD fiat. Its fundamental stability mechanism rests on its 100% backing by Agora’s Reserves. These reserves are held in highly liquid, low-risk instruments, composed explicitly of cash, overnight repurchase and reverse repurchase agreements, and short-term U.S. Treasury securities.

The architecture’s central feature is its integration with regulated financial behemoths, forming a sophisticated compliance mechanism. Cash reserves are custodied, and the overall fund is administered by State Street, one of the world’s largest financial services providers. Concurrently, reserve assets are managed by VanEck, a global investment management firm. This dual partnership with globally recognized regulated institutions, including GSIBs (Globally Systemically Important Banks), forms the basis of AUSD’s institutional-grade claim.

The deep integration with State Street and VanEck represents a deliberate strategy to establish a "compliance premium" in the stablecoin market. For institutional capital, which is inherently risk-averse, the greatest concern often centers on counterparty risk and asset segregation. This structural separation of the issuer (Agora), the administrator (State Street), and the investment manager (VanEck) transfers the necessary trust quotient from a newer technology company to the regulated legacy financial system. This structural choice is essential for mitigating systemic risk concerns regarding asset segregation and counterparty liability, thereby making AUSD a structurally safer on-ramp for sophisticated, risk-managed funds.

For AUSD to serve as a reliable settlement layer for global finance, pervasive cross-chain availability is mandatory. AUSD is already supported across over 12 chains, enabling flexible payments and settlements across various networks.

The dedication to interoperability was further solidified by the implementation of AUSD0 via Layer Zero’s OFT (Omnichain Fungible Token) standard upgrade in November 2025. This technical development is critical because it allows Agora to unify liquidity across 140+ chains, eliminating the fragmentation that plagues many cross-chain assets. A unified liquidity structure is essential for large institutional transfers, ensuring minimal slippage and predictable redemption capabilities regardless of the network utilized.

Core Architecture Comparison: Instant Liquidity vs. White-Label

The Instant Liquidity solution is one of Agora’s core institutional offerings, developed to enhance the accessibility and utility of AUSD within the broader stablecoin economy. The primary function of this product is to enable the atomic minting and redemption of AUSD against other select, high-liquidity stablecoin assets, specifically USDC and USDT initially.

The underlying technology leverages the existing deep liquidity of these global stablecoins to achieve interoperability with AUSD. Institutions manage this process through Agora’s Atlas interface, which acts as a centralized venue. This system allows institutions to submit non-AUSD stablecoins and instantly redeem them at a 1:1 rate for AUSD. The solution offers a leap forward in interoperability, specifically aiming to bring AUSD’s liquidity profile closer to that of the world’s most dominant stablecoins.

A significant limitation for traditional fiat-backed stablecoins is their reliance on conventional banking hours for large-scale redemptions. The Instant Liquidity solution directly eliminates this friction. This mechanism enhances AUSD’s functional liquidity and its operational superiority for large-scale, asynchronous global treasury management, ensuring that institutional clientele can manage capital adjustments instantly regardless of geographic location or time zone.

Furthermore, Agora prioritizes adoption and utilization velocity over short-term transaction revenue. The product offers 0% fee transfers for USDC, USDT, and AUSD, including zero fees for on and off-ramps.²

The system is explicitly designed for large-scale users, including trading firms, financial institutions, and established fintechs, enabling them to offer novel services to their existing customer bases.

The solution serves as a unified venue for businesses to manage their total stablecoin holdings, utilizing AUSD as a linchpin mechanism. The system provides sophisticated clients, such as holders of tokenized treasury products, the ability to instantly redeem their tokens for AUSD in significant size. This ensures that businesses maintain real-time control, allowing them to adjust their digital asset holdings instantly.

Agora’s White Label stablecoin solution positions the company as a Stablecoin Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) provider. This product allows businesses to launch their own branded, compliant digital dollar in as little as a single day, relying entirely on the robust Agora infrastructure stack.

The infrastructure is built for scale and security, tapping into AUSD's existing global liquidity network across exchanges, on/off ramps, and institutional custodians. The comprehensive service offering is exhaustive, covering everything required for a compliant launch: institutional-grade custodianship, asset management, robust stablecoin dashboards and analytics, forward-thinking global compliance architecture, and integrations with CEXs and DEXs. This model has already seen institutional validation, with partners such as VanEck and Flowdesk leveraging this white-label infrastructure to issue their own compliant stablecoins in the market.

The most significant strategic differentiator of the White-Label solution is its economic model. Unlike many incumbent stablecoin issuers who retain the interest generated by reserve assets, the Agora model allows the institutional partner or issuing business to control the yield generated by the reserve assets (short-term US Treasuries and Repos).

This mechanism is promoted as a way to grow your business and attract more customers, and to avoid "leaving millions on the table". Given that reserve assets are backed by instruments like U.S. Treasuries, the yields available have historically been in the range of 4-5%. This yield-sharing strategy fundamentally transforms the stablecoin liability from a non-interest-bearing asset for the institutional partner into a revenue-generating vehicle.

This architectural decision to share reserve yield fundamentally transforms Agora's role from a simple stablecoin issuer to an "economic enabler" for its partners. This is the primary mechanism for monetizing the institutional relationship, strategically moving beyond reliance on transaction fees. The ability for partners to capture the 4-5% spread on reserve assets creates a powerful financial incentive structure, effectively locking in large-scale institutional players who would otherwise be motivated to launch costlier, proprietary solutions just to capture the yield. This economic "flywheel model" is designed to ensure sustained demand, higher AUSD circulation, and increased Total Value Locked (TVL) across the network.

Agora’s focus on compliance, institutional partnerships, and yield capture positions it as a critical player in the emerging tokenized Real World Asset (RWA) market. The firm actively partners with RWA platforms, including Securitize and Superstate. Furthermore, the involvement of VanEck in asset management provides expertise in bridging traditional investment vehicles with digital assets.

Agora is also a member of the TAC, which truly signals their longterm involvement with and the support of RWA adoption.

The Agora ecosystem is described as a comprehensive "network of financial institutions, platforms, and innovators" tethered together by AUSD. An exhaustive review of the network demonstrates the depth of Agora’s institutional reach and its commitment to ensuring ubiquity across all critical functional components of the digital asset space.

The partnership roster covers essential services required by institutional capital: secure asset custody (e.g., Fireblocks, BitGo, Copper, Zodia Custody, HEX Trust); major DeFi lending and exchange protocols (e.g., Aave, Uniswap, Curve, Balancer, Morpho); and institutional trading and market-making giants (e.g., Cumberland, Flowdesk, and Wintermute).

Agora Ecosystem: Categorized Partner Summary

Agora’s strategy for market validation involves targeted, high-impact deployments intended to capture liquidity and drive utility in specialized markets.

This aggressive strategy is designed to achieve simultaneous deep integration across all major crypto verticals—Layer 1s, Layer 2s, Lending, DEXs, and Custody. Such a comprehensive partnership acquisition program is critical for overcoming the entrenched network effect and liquidity inertia of dominant stablecoins like USDC and USDT.

They’ve partnered with Upshift and launched on Monad day 1. This partnership always announces the use of $earnAUSD, described as “Upshift’s liquid yield token, systematically allocating AUSD across basis trade and delta-neutral DeFi opportunities, making it the simplest way to earn optimized risk-adjusted yield on your stables.”

The company has received recognition that validates its architectural focus and strategic positioning within the broader financial technology landscape. Agora was named to the Top Fintech 100 list. This recognition places Agora alongside other global fintech leaders, validating its innovation in financial infrastructure and its strategic efforts to redefine how financial services interact with digital assets.

AUSD directly challenges the established duopoly of USDC and USDT through structural and economic divergence.

The most compelling economic argument for AUSD is its willingness to share reserve yields (estimated at 4-5% from U.S. Treasuries) with partners. This model directly contrasts with the standard operating practice of most fiat-backed stablecoin issuers, who retain all interest income generated by billions in reserves. This yield-sharing model functions as a massive financial incentive to drive adoption by financial institutions.

Structurally, AUSD and USDC pursue different avenues to achieve institutional trust. USDC, issued by Circle, prioritizes transparency through weekly reserve data publication and monthly attestations performed by Deloitte. In contrast, AUSD’s primary mechanism for securing institutional trust is the regulatory standing and reputation of its third-party partners: State Street and VanEck. While both approaches aim for trust, AUSD’s strategy effectively transfers a large portion of the systemic and counterparty risk to highly regulated GSIBs.

Comparison of Leading Fiat-Backed Stablecoin Architectures

While all three entities offer B2B stablecoin infrastructure, Agora, Paxos, and Bridge are optimized for distinct segments. Agora and Paxos compete directly to issue high-compliance, white-labeled stablecoin assets and attract large institutional deposits by leveraging aggressive yield economics. Paxos holds a clear advantage in regulatory certainty, operating under the NYDFS Trust Charter, which grants it fiduciary powers, making it the top choice for regulated banks and corporate treasuries. Agora competes by bundling institutional reserve management (via State Street and VanEck) with critical utility features like LayerZero interoperability, making it highly competitive for next-generation DeFi protocols.  

In contrast, Bridge operates in the operational utility layer, largely avoiding the asset issuance risk and the high regulatory bar of the NYDFS charter. Bridge maintains US state Money Transmitter Licenses and focuses on providing a full-stack toolkit, including Cards, Wallets, and Orchestration, to enable fintechs to quickly move money globally. This strategy positions Bridge to win mandates based on simplified logistics and cost-effective cross-border payments, rather than competing with Agora and Paxos on reserve yield or ultimate issuance authority.

The competitive landscape for AUSD is now defined by the enactment of the Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for U.S. Stablecoins Act (GENIUS Act) in July 2025, which established a federal regulatory framework for payment stablecoins in the U.S.. While the Act provides foundational clarity, including confirming that a permitted payment stablecoin is not a security, the primary challenge has shifted to the rulemaking phase. Federal regulators are now tasked with writing detailed rules on capital, liquidity, and risk management for all issuers within 18 months of the Act’s enactment. This phase will significantly increase the compliance requirements and operational costs for the entire stablecoin industry.  

The policy outlook, however, may ultimately favor Agora’s proactive approach. U.S. regulation now mandates strict requirements, such as 100% backing and standards for reserve asset quality. Agora’s existing, rigorous compliance-forward architecture positions it well to navigate these new requirements. Its reliance on GSIBs and regulated asset managers for core functions, cash is custodied by State Street and assets are managed by VanEck, means that Agora’s structure is already aligned with a high compliance standard. This pre-alignment could create a formidable regulatory moat against less prepared competitors who currently operate with greater proprietary control over their reserve management.

In Addition, since May of 2025, Agora has worked with Chaos Labs to implement a Proof of Reserves. This added layer is essential for trust and verification. This moves signals Agora desire to stay ahead of the curve and regulatory changes.

Agora's strategic approach to monetization is based on a "Stablecoin 3.0" model, which relies on reserve income and a partner-centric distribution strategy. The core revenue is generated from the Reserve Rewards on the backing assets—cash, U.S. Treasury bills, and overnight repurchase agreements—that 1:1 collateralize the AUSD stablecoin. However, a significant portion of this income is strategically shared with ecosystem partners (exchanges, platforms, builders) who drive AUSD utility and liquidity, a critical differentiator from incumbents who retain most of this passive income.  

Unlike traditional B2B infrastructure providers, Agora does not rely on service fees from its core white-label issuance product. Instead, its revenue hinges on maximizing the circulation and velocity of AUSD through its ecosystem. The Instant Liquidity solution, for example, offers 0% fees for on- and off-ramps and conversions between AUSD and other stablecoins (USDC/USDT), directly prioritizing adoption and utility velocity over short-term transaction revenue.  

This economic structure transforms AUSD into a revenue-generating asset for institutional partners. The White-Label solution allows businesses to capture and control the 4–5% yield generated by their reserve assets, turning the stablecoin liability into a profit center for the partner. Agora's long-term profit is derived from the overall increase in AUM (Total Value Locked) and the income it retains on its own float, incentivizing maximum network growth and deep platform integration over transactional fees.  

Note: Agora does not publicly disclose its take rate, so we can only estimate its profitability.

Agora Finance is aggressively pursuing market share by creating a vertically integrated infrastructure suite that is strategically differentiated from incumbent stablecoins. Its strategic moat is built on two primary pillars: infrastructure specialization (White-Label PaaS) and a powerful economic incentive (reserve yield sharing). This architecture, coupled with the security theatre provided by State Street and VanEck, presents a strong case for institutional engagement.

However, the protocol is not without challenges. AUSD's market capitalization remains significantly smaller than its competitors, and the public scrutiny resulting from the Anchorage delisting highlights an ongoing operational and reputational risk that hinges entirely on policy resolution.

In light of that, we at Exo feel that Agora is doing more than enough to overcome. The Chaos Proof of Reserves, the $50M growth in the last week from Monad’s expansion, their involvement with the Tokenized Asset Coalition and the advancement of the GENIUS Act are all important functions for the continued success of the team.

We have thoroughly enjoyed researching the product and look forward to seeing their growth within crypto and beyond.

BONUS: For sophisticated institutional protocol builders, fund managers, and technical analysts assessing the stablecoin landscape, the analysis yields several actionable recommendations:

Want more? Check out this podcast with cofounder Drake and this Case Studies author, Dirt.