Blockchain governance startup Agora plans to acquire competitor Boardroom. The company sees the acquisition as a strategic move to strengthen governance within the broader Ethereum ecosystem, citing expectations for new growth in decentralized governance due to President Trump's promises to the blockchain industry. Positioned.
“2025 is the year we make good governance standards for all Ethereum protocols,” Agora co-founder Yitong Zhang told CoinDesk.
Agora was founded in 2022 by Chan, Charlie Feng, and Kent Fenwick. The trio initially started working on governance tools with Nouns DAO, one of the hottest blockchain protocols to emerge from the 2021 DAO (Decentralized Autonomous Organization) and NFT hype cycle.
The term “DAO” generally refers to a crypto community managed by token holders. Although they are an unwieldy way to run a pseudo-company, they are popular among those who believe that the decentralized spirit of cryptocurrencies can be a world-changing force. This has paved the way for aid projects like Agora.
Agora was founded on the premise that token governance is central to the value of crypto protocols. It aims to provide user-friendly open source governance tools for DAOs such as Uniswap and Optimism. Both companies are currently using Agora to organize token holders and hold governance votes.
Boardroom, which predates Agora and has similar goals, has taken a more horizontal approach to blockchain governance. Boardroom has gradually transitioned from an Agora-style DAO tool software to a “Bloomberg”-like data feed for crypto governance data.
Agora declined to say how much it paid to buy Boardroom. Boardroom employees have been given positions at Agora, and Boardroom founder Kevin Nielsen will remain as an advisor. Zhang said there are “no plans to retire” Boardroom. Rather, the Agora team will continue to run both platforms and work with users to determine how to gradually integrate the tools.
Is it a new day for DAO?
In 2025, “DAO” will not be as much of a buzzword as it was a few years ago. These were pitched as a way to leverage blockchain's core strengths in decentralized coordination to promote new kinds of community-owned enterprises, but they have been implemented in a variety of ways and with varying degrees of success.
Many DAOs are suffering due to systemic issues. Coordinating thousands of token holders towards a single goal can be difficult. Improving DAO tools can help address this issue, but it's only one side of the equation. Another barrier for DAOs is the lack of regulatory clarity, which leaves open questions regarding legal liability and how DAOs should issue tokens, as well as how token holders and platforms is having difficulty deciding how to divide decision-making among its core developers.
“From a business perspective, DAOs are coming back in a really big way,” said Zhang, who said his business has grown “10x” over the past year. “People are so traumatized by the DAO bull**t that they still don’t realize it.”
The Trump administration has indicated it intends to create clearer guidelines for issuing cryptocurrencies, leading to optimism among Zhang and some of his competitors.
“I think we will finally have a reasonable definition of a sufficiently decentralized, secure, and compliant way to run tokens,” Chan said.
