Agora, the institutional-first stablecoin platform co-founded by Nick van Eck, Drake Evans and Joe McGrady, announced today that its digital dollar, AUSD, now supports LayerZero’s OFT standard. The move launches AUSD0, a cross-chain version of AUSD, that will make the Treasury-backed, yield-bearing dollar available to millions of new users and thousands of new applications, beginning with five blockchains and potentially expanding to 140+ LayerZero-connected chains.
AUSD was built with a distinct institutional focus. Unlike many stablecoins that act only as a medium of exchange, Agora’s design channels yield from its Treasury-backed reserves to merchant partners, creating shared revenue streams rather than concentrating returns with the issuer. That partner-first approach has helped AUSD grow from zero to more than $170 million in circulation across several blockchain ecosystems.
Seamless Cross-chain Transfers
AUSD0 simply extends that institutional-grade asset beyond isolated deployments. By adopting LayerZero’s OFT connectivity layer, Agora separates distribution from the plumbing of cross-chain movement: Agora can concentrate on issuing and distributing AUSD on individual chains, while LayerZero provides the interoperability that lets the same asset move and live across many different ledgers.
Nick van Eck, Agora’s CEO and co-founder, framed the partnership as a practical acceleration of the company’s roadmap. He said, “Partnering with LayerZero on AUSD and AUSD0 was a natural fit. This enables seamless cross-chain transfers for our natively issued AUSD, and enables us to capture emerging ecosystems faster through AUSD0. Giving us back the time to double down on our infrastructure and product roadmap.”
Beyond simple portability, AUSD0 is a strategic bet on a yield-sharing model for tokenized dollars. Agora allows companies to launch branded stablecoins built on AUSD’s infrastructure, tapping into shared liquidity and the platform’s treasury yields. With AUSD0’s cross-chain compatibility, that shared liquidity and yield becomes more powerful, available to partners and developers regardless of which blockchain they build on.
The announcement name-checks two heavyweight institutional partners to show Agora’s credibility: VanEck, the asset manager with $147.6 billion in assets, and State Street, the custodian managing roughly $49 trillion in assets. Agora says that offering a stablecoin backed by treasury reserves associated with such institutions helps close a credibility gap that has often separated crypto from traditional finance.
LayerZero’s CEO Bryan Pellegrino highlighted interoperability as the distribution mechanism enabling rapid expansion. He said, “Interop at this point is just becoming the de facto distribution mechanism for assets, giving teams like Agora the ability to bring tokenized dollars to lots of new users and differentiated apps and merchants. Bringing Agora to more chains only makes it cheaper and easier to move tokenized dollars and for partners of theirs to create chain-specific white labeled stablecoins backed by AUSD, which is awesome – especially because all of this runs on code instead of business hours.”
Practical Benefits
For merchants and developers, the practical benefits are concrete: access to Treasury-backed yield across LayerZero-connected chains, the ability to reduce fees or distribute rewards funded by treasury returns, and a day-one institutional-grade stablecoin to integrate into new chains and applications. For chains themselves, adding AUSD0 could mean instant access to yield revenue streams that, in Agora’s view, will help attract developers and users.
Agora’s announcement frames AUSD0 as part of a larger thesis: programmable, moveable money, not siloed, chain-specific dollars, will power the next era of online commerce. The company argues that creating a stablecoin that both bears yield and moves seamlessly between ledgers creates a self-reinforcing flywheel: better institutional assets attract users and volume, volume generates more treasury yield, and yield in turn creates more incentives for partners to adopt and distribute the asset.
While other traditional finance players debate how to engage with crypto infrastructure, Agora, backed by VanEck and State Street relationships, is betting on building the rails now. AUSD0 represents the company’s push to make yield-bearing, institutionally credible digital dollars broadly available across the rapidly evolving landscape of blockchains.
If the rollout goes as planned, Agora’s AUSD0 could accelerate adoption in nascent chains and applications hungry for a trusted stablecoin, and in doing so, test whether Treasury-backed yield and broad interoperability together can reshape how commerce flows on-chain.
