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We think of the Stablecoin classification completely wrong, Agora Ceo Nick van Eck me told me.
It is easy to make all stablecoins pop into a single bucket, but the reality is that the range quickly becomes more unique and different as the space matures.
Many stablecoins are “very different and have very different user profiles”, which means that they “ultimately don’t even compete”.
“Someone who wants to use Usde as a form of collateral is probably not the same user of AUSD or USDC 95% of the time. Maybe they will use it for trade, but [if]… you want to buy a Treasury account or a treasury bond, you don’t buy a corporate bond, right? “
You have centralized High-Trust Stablecoins, including Agora or Circle. Then there is centralized opaque, which would be fixed. The difference between the two is the amount of transparency offered, but both categories are aimed at the global monetary network perspective.
Another is ‘centralized prison distribution’, including gaming companies or banks such as Bank of America (CEO Brian Moynihan teased earlier that the bank is interested in such an offer). The idea here is that companies in this category are more interested in keeping their Stablecoin offer within their company instead of expanding worldwide, Van Eck explained.
The fourth and last is decentralized Stablecoins. This broader category catches Ethena, which praised Van Eck as a ‘very good operator’, and some of the more experimental trips in Stablecoins.
The customer base of Agora, Van Eck noted, usually consists of people who are just in crypto, no longer seasoned people who want to return their collateral.
The team wants to create a worldwide Stablecoin network.
“We see a world where AUSD is traded on every exchange and has worldwide liquidity,” he told me. This opens the door for people to build on top of Agora and “Use our tooling and cross-chain infrastructure, our centralized exchange infrastructure, our FX on and out of slopes.”
While legislators think about stablecoin legislation, Van Eck is enthusiastic about what it means for space. Although he told me never to say never when it comes to wearing stablecoins-that will not be a priority for Agora.
“From the first day, I was very much expecting that the US government and the SEC would not allow interest-bearing stablecoins, and that is why we have designed our model as one-on-one, where we simply share underlying economy with the companies, versus it is native.”
No skin from Agora’s back, especially since it seems that legislators are not so enthusiastic about wearing stablecoins.
