Agora, a blockchain governance startup, will acquire its competitor Boardroom. The company framed the acquisition as a strategic move to improve governance within the broader Ethereum ecosystem, citing expectations of renewed growth in decentralized governance due to President Trump’s promise of regulatory clarity for the blockchain industry.
“2025 is the year we make good governance the standard for all protocols on Ethereum,” Agora co-founder Yitong Zhang told CoinDesk.
Agora was founded in 2022 by Zhang, Charlie Feng and Kent Fenwick. Initially, the trio began working on governance tools in Nouns DAO, one of the most popular blockchain protocols to emerge from the DAO (decentralized autonomous organization) and NFT hype cycle of 2021.
The term “DAO” generally describes crypto communities that are governed by their token holders. They are a favorite among those who believe that the decentralized spirit of cryptocurrencies can be a world-changing force, even if it is an unwieldy way to run a pseudo-business. That has created an opening for support projects like Agora.
Agora was founded on the premise that token governance is critical to the value of crypto protocols. It aims to provide easy-to-use, open source governance tools for DAOs like Uniswap and Optimism, which are currently using Agora to organize token holders and conduct governance voting.
Boardroom, which predates Agora and has similar goals, took a more horizontal approach to blockchain governance. Boardroom has gradually moved from an Agora-style DAO tool software to a data source, similar to a “Bloomberg” for crypto governance data.
Agora declined to disclose how much it paid to acquire Boardroom. Boardroom employees have been offered positions at Agora, and Boardroom founder Kevin Nielsen will remain as an advisor. “There is no plan to disapprove” Boardroom, according to Zhang. Rather, the Agora team will keep both platforms running and work with users to determine how the tools could be gradually integrated.
A new day for DAOs?
“DAO” is less of a buzzword in 2025 than it was a few years ago. They were presented as a way to leverage blockchain’s core strengths in decentralized coordination to promote a new type of community-owned enterprise, but they have been implemented in various ways and with varying degrees of success.
Many DAOs have failed due to organizational difficulties; It can be difficult to coordinate thousands of token holders around a single goal. Improving DAO tools can help solve this problem, but it is only one side of the equation. Another barrier for DAOs has been a lack of regulatory clarity, which has left questions of legal liability open and made it difficult for DAOs to determine how tokens should be issued and how decisions should be divided between token holders and developers. principals of a platform.
“From a business perspective, DAOs are making a comeback in a big way,” said Zhang, who says his own business has grown “10-fold” over the past year. “People haven’t realized it yet because they have a lot of trauma from the DAO nonsense.”
The Trump administration has expressed its intention to create clearer guidelines for the issuance of cryptocurrencies, which has generated optimism among Zhang and some of his competitors.
“I think we will eventually get reasonable definitions of sufficient decentralization, security, and compatible ways to make a token,” Zhang said.
