On Thursday, Agora became the latest stablecoin company to attract the attention of deep-pocketed venture investors, as the crypto startup announced a $50 million investment led by the blockchain-focused VC firm Paradigm.
Cofounded by Nick van Eck—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.
But with the new funding, which follows a $12 million seed round last year, Agora hopes to build up AUSD, its own stablecoin, or a type of cryptocurrency that is pegged to an underlying asset such as the U.S. dollar. Agora offers a white-labeling service to other companies, allowing them to launch their own, self-branded version of AUSD that is able to take advantage of the underlying stablecoin’s interoperability and liquidity.
“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.”
Stablecoin explosion
