“Agora CEO Nick van Eck sees stablecoin adoption shifting to real-world business for cross-border payments.”, — write: www.coindesk.com
While decentralized finance (DeFi) remains a key growth engine – Agora’s total value locked (TVL) grew 60% last month from DeFi launches, he said – his focus is shifting towards a longer-term bet: stablecoin-powered enterprise payments.
“We’re spending a lot of time across payroll, business-to-business, cross-border payments. Problems real companies actually need to solve,” van Eck, who will be speaking at CoinDesk’s Consensus Hong Kong conference next month, said in a recent interview.
He believes adoption by traditional firms is inevitable but slow, delayed by unfamiliar infrastructure, lack of internal policies, and basic education gaps. “If stablecoin knowledge in the crypto world is a hundred,” he said, then outside of is “a five.”
Agora issues AUSD, a US dollar-backed stablecoin, and also offers stablecoin-as-a-service for crypto projects wanting to mint their own branded tokens. But van Eck doesn’t recommend it for most. “It only makes sense if you have a closed-loop ecosystem,” he said. “Otherwise, use a major stablecoin.”
The bigger opportunity, van Eck argued, lies in replacing clunky cross-border payment systems, where pre-funding and transaction costs eat into corporate margins. “If they save 1% on revenue, that might be 5% on EBITDA,” he said. The most likely early adopters? Multinational firms with global vendor networks.
Looking ahead, van Eck sees corporate chains like Circle’s Arc, Coinbase’s Base or Stripe’s Tempo pulling activity away from open-source blockchains. “You’ll see consolidation into a handful of chains,” he predicted, as major firms bring “money, firepower and distribution.”
In this increasingly competitive landscape, Agora’s ambition is to be one of the top five global stablecoin issuers — and to win by building tools businesses actually know how to use.
“They don’t want crypto,” van Eck said. “They want something that feels like a bank account, but better.”
KuCoin captured a record share of centralized exchange volume in 2025, with more than $1.25tn traded as its volumes grew faster than the broader crypto market.
- KuCoin recorded over $1.25 trillion in total trading volume in 2025equivalent to an average of roughly $114 billion per monthmarking its strongest year on record.
- This performance translated into an all-time high share of centralized exchange volumeas KuCoin’s activity expanded faster than aggregate CEX volumeswhich slowed during periods of lower market volatility.
- Spot and derivatives volumes were evenly spliteach exceeding $500 billion for the year, signaling broad-based usage rather than reliance on a single product line.
- Altcoins accounted for the majority of trading activityreinforcing KuCoin’s role as a primary liquidity venue beyond BTC and ETH at a time when majors saw more muted turnover.
- Even as overall crypto volumes softened mid-year, KuCoin maintained elevated baseline activityindicating structurally higher user engagement rather than short-lived volume spikes.
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Brian Armstrong returns from the World Economic Forum with a message: traditional finance is taking crypto seriously
- Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong said a top executive at one of the world’s 10 largest banks told him crypto is now the bank’s “number one priority” and an “existential” issue.
- At Davos, Armstrong highlighted tokenization of assets and stablecoins as major themes, arguing that they could broaden access to investments for billions while threatening to bypass traditional banks.
- He described the Trump administration as the most crypto-forward government globally, backing efforts like the CLARITY Act, and predicted that AI agents will increasingly use stablecoins for payments outside conventional banking rails.
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