Agora, a blockchain governance startup, is ready to amass its competitor Boardroom. The corporate framed the acquisition as a strategic transfer to boost governance throughout the broader Ethereum ecosystem, citing expectations of renewed progress in decentralized governance as a consequence of President Trump’s promise of regulatory readability for the blockchain business.
“2025 is the yr we make good governance the usual for all protocols in Ethereum,” Agora co-founder Yitong Zhang advised CoinDesk.
Agora was based in 2022 by Zhang, Charlie Feng, and Kent Fenwick. The trio initially began engaged on governance tooling at Nouns DAO, one of many buzzier blockchain protocols to emerge from 2021’s DAO (decentralized autonomous group) and NFT hype cycle.
The time period “DAO” usually describes crypto communities which can be ruled by their token holders. They’re a favourite amongst those that imagine crypto’s decentralization ethos could be a world-changing power, albeit an unwieldy option to run a pseudo-company. That’s created a gap for assist initiatives like Agora.
Agora was based on the premise that token governance is central to the worth of crypto protocols. It goals to offer user-friendly, open-source governance instruments for DAOs like Uniswap and Optimism, which each presently use Agora to prepare token holders and maintain governance votes.
Boardroom, which predated Agora and has related objectives, took a extra horizontal strategy to blockchain governance. Boardroom has regularly transitioned from an Agora-style DAO tooling software program to an information feed—just like a “Bloomberg” for crypto governance knowledge.
Agora declined to reveal how a lot it paid to amass Boardroom. Boardroom’s workers have been supplied roles at Agora, and Boardroom’s founder, Kevin Nielsen, will stay as an advisor. “There isn’t any plan to deprecate” Boardroom, in accordance with Zhang. Reasonably, the Agora group will preserve each platforms operating and can work with customers to find out how the instruments may regularly be built-in.
A brand new day for DAOs?
“DAO” is much less of a buzzword in 2025 than it was a number of years in the past. They have been pitched as a option to leverage blockchain’s core strengths in decentralized coordination to advance a brand new sort of community-owned firm, however they have been carried out in varied methods and to various levels of success.
Many DAOs have floundered as a consequence of organizational difficulties; it may be arduous to coordinate 1000’s of token-holders round a single aim. Enhancing DAO tooling may help to handle this, however it is just one aspect of the equation. One other barrier for DAOs has been a scarcity of regulatory readability, which has left open questions of authorized legal responsibility and has made it troublesome for DAOs to find out how tokens must be issued, and the way choices must be divided between token holders and a platform’s core builders.
“From a enterprise perspective, DAOs are coming again in a extremely, actually giant means,” stated Zhang, who says his personal enterprise has grown “10X” over the previous yr. “Folks have not observed but as a result of folks have a lot trauma over DAO bulls**t.”
The Trump administration has signaled its intention to create clearer pointers for cryptocurrency issuance, which has led to optimism amongst Zhang and a few of his rivals.
“I feel we’re gonna lastly get cheap definitions for adequate decentralization, safety, and compliant methods of doing a token,” stated Zhang.”