Stablecoin startup Agora announced the completion of a $50 million Series A financing round, led by Paradigm and followed by Dragonfly. The funds will be used to promote the global expansion and compliance layout of its core product AUSD.
This is not the first time that Agora has been favored by capital. As early as April 2024, the company completed a $12 million seed round of financing, led by Dragonfly. The two rounds of financing totaled $62 million, making Agora one of the few platform projects in the current stablecoin track that has received continuous bets from top institutions.
Who is Agora? What is its origin?
Agora is a stablecoin startup founded in 2023 by three co-founders, Nick van Eck, Drake Evans and Joe McGrady, and is committed to creating a new platform-based stablecoin architecture, also called white label stablecoin.
Nick van Eck comes from a traditional financial background and is the son of Jan van Eck, the founder of the well-known asset management company VanEck. Co-founder Drake Evans worked as a core engineer at MakerDAO, and Joe McGrady has engineering and operations experience in Bridgewater-style institutions.
Agora has completed two rounds of financing so far. In April 2024, Agora completed a $12 million seed round led by Dragonfly Capital to develop its core product AUSD and build a white label issuance platform. In July 2025, Agora announced the completion of a $50 million Series A financing, led by Paradigm and followed by Dragonfly. The funds will be used to accelerate global expansion and compliance layout. To date, Agora has raised a total of $62 million, becoming one of the few platform projects in the stablecoin track that has received continuous bets from top venture capital.
White label stablecoin AUSD, a new story or an old packaging?
Tether and Circle have long dominated the stablecoin market, one relying on its size to dominate exchanges, and the other focusing on compliance to connect with traditional finance. But Agora does not intend to become another USDT or USDC.
But beneath the surface, this pattern is being disrupted by a startup called Agora.
Agora was founded by Nick van Eck, the son of the founder of VanEck Investment Group, and two crypto industry engineers. Its positioning is different from Tether and Circle. It did not try to make a more compliant USDT or a more decentralized USDC, but chose a new platform-based path: to build an infrastructure that everyone can use to issue their own stablecoins.
The AUSD it launched is a stablecoin pegged to the US dollar and supported by an asset pool managed by State Street Bank and VanEck. Unlike Tether and Circles single-coin distribution, Agora uses AUSD as the underlying unified liquidation asset and opens white-label issuance services on this basis - any enterprise, whether it is a Web3 project or an overseas payment company, can quickly issue its own brand of stablecoins, such as GameUSD and ABC Pay Dollar, all of which share the on-chain liquidity and interchangeability of AUSD.
This idea is actually a bit like the model when Paxos and PayPal cooperated to issue PYUSD in the early days. But the difference is that Paxos builds an independent stablecoin system for its partners, while Agoras partners must build directly on AUSD. This unified underlying design makes it easier for the entire system to aggregate liquidity and create network effects.
This platform-based issuance logic not only lowers the threshold for corporate stablecoin issuance, but also establishes stronger ecological stickiness and moat for Agora.
From the perspective of compliance and technology construction, Agora is not a start-up. It is highly tied to traditional finance: asset custody is handed over to State Street, asset management is handled by VanEck, and custody technology also introduces Coppers MPC solution. At the same time, Agora is obtaining money transmission licenses (MTL) in various states in the United States to prepare for entering the US market in the future.
In terms of ecological cooperation, Agora has cooperated with Polygon Labs to promote the issuance of customized stablecoins based on AUSD, and has also completed the first over-the-counter transaction of crypto asset management institution Galaxy. AUSD is currently listed on LBank and has opened USDT trading pairs, and has also received support from projects such as Injective, Flowdesk, Conduit, and Plume Network. On the chain, AUSD has achieved multi-chain deployment such as Ethereum, Sui, and Avalanche through Wormhole; Agora has also cooperated with Agglayer, a cross-chain aggregation protocol launched by Polygon, trying to make AUSD its native stablecoin.
Data source: rwa.xyz
Of course, the total market value of AUSD is still less than 200 million US dollars, which is still an order of magnitude away from USDTs 159.1 billion and USDCs 62 billion. But in the view of top institutions such as Paradigm and Dragonfly, Agoras platform logic may mean a structural reconstruction of the stablecoin market: stablecoins are no longer just products, but can become platforms, allowing every institution to have its own on-chain dollars.
If the logic of stablecoins in the past was Ill send you one, the logic of Agora is Ill build one and send it to you. Tether and Circle are products of stablecoins, while Agora is more like the AWS of stablecoin issuance.
Data source: coingecko.com
To seize the US market, what does a multi-state money transmission license (MTL) mean?
For stablecoin issuers, applying for a multi-state money transfer license (MTL) is not only a pass for compliant operations, but also a key to open the door to the huge US market. MTL not only qualifies companies to legally conduct fund transmission and stablecoin issuance in multiple states, but also greatly enhances the trust of banks, exchanges and institutional investors, becoming the basic guarantee for cooperation. At the same time, MTL requires companies to strictly comply with multiple compliance obligations such as anti-money laundering (AML), customer identification (KYC) and regulatory reporting to ensure the transparency and security of the business and lay a solid foundation for the launch of innovative products and services in the future. For this reason, MTL is not only a solid barrier to prevent legal and regulatory risks, but also a strategic capital for stablecoin companies to gain a foothold and continue to develop in the US market.
Currently, mainstream stablecoin issuers such as Circle, Paxos, Gemini and TrustToken have obtained money transmission licenses in multiple states.
As the issuer of USDC, Circle has extensive MTL coverage, which provides a solid guarantee for it to gain recognition from mainstream financial institutions and banks.
Paxos is also actively planning compliance, holding MTLs in multiple states, and promoting the issuance of stablecoins through cooperation with PayPal, Binance and others.
Geminis GUSD is one of the first stablecoins in the industry to obtain a license from the New York Department of Financial Services, and its issuing company also holds multi-state money transmission licenses.
TrustToken has obtained MTL in multiple states to support the legal issuance and circulation of its various asset-backed stablecoins.
In addition to these stablecoin issuers, some digital asset custodians and trading platforms such as Anchorage Digital, BitPay and Kraken have also applied for and obtained multi-state MTLs. Generally, licensed institutions will give priority to covering states with strict regulations and active crypto businesses, such as New York, California, Texas and Florida. Obtaining an MTL requires meeting strict capital adequacy, anti-money laundering (AML), customer identification (KYC) and compliance reporting requirements. Overall, holding a multi-state MTL has become a key compliance threshold for stablecoin products to gain market recognition and institutional cooperation. Agora is applying for a multi-state MTL with the goal of entering this compliance camp and opening the door to the US market.
As a rising star, Agora is actively applying for multi-state MTL, which is an important step for it to achieve legal and compliant operations, integrate into the mainstream financial system of the United States, and move towards market expansion. Through this move, Agora not only shows its high attention to compliance, but also sends a strong signal: it is determined to become a new force that cannot be ignored in the field of stablecoins, win the recognition of the market and institutions, and open a new chapter in global layout.
Betting on Agora, Paradigm is not following the trend
Paradigms investment logic has never been to follow the trend, but to bet on projects that can reconstruct infrastructure logic. Agora happens to hit several areas that Paradigm focuses on:
The integration path of traditional finance + blockchain: Agora leverages State Street and VanEck to embed compliance trust into on-chain products and build an institution-friendly issuance network.
The distribution logic of stablecoins has been reshaped: from I issue coins and you use them to I build the system and you issue them. It is no longer just about making a stablecoin, but providing the ability to issue stablecoins to enhance network effects and capital efficiency.
Product design that adapts to regulatory trends: Actively applying for MTL and connecting to the financial regulatory framework will give Agora a first-mover advantage in the upcoming US regulatory cycle.
Charlie Noyes, partner at Paradigm, said in an interview: Agoras product is a stablecoin system with built-in batteries. Companies dont need to hire ten engineers to start a stablecoin business immediately.
