Nick van Eck, co-founder of Agora, joins Frank Chaparro for a candid conversation about where stablecoins are headed

Nick spent years backing crypto companies as a venture investor at General Catalyst before co-founding Agora two years ago. Agora issues AUSD and is building infrastructure to help businesses move their operations on-chain, positioning itself as the horizontally neutral alternative to Tether and Circle.

In this conversation, Nick breaks down why banks' real fear isn't stablecoins but the threat to their deposit base, why most tokenized assets are still objectively worse than their traditional counterparts, and why he chose not to launch a governance token — and what that decision has taught him about product-market fit. He also reflects on what he got wrong as a VC that he only understood after becoming a founder, and where Agora is placing its bets over the next six months.

This episode is worth your time if you’re following the direction of where onchain finance is going.