Agora, a blockchain governance startup, is set to acquire its competitor Boardroom. The company presented the acquisition as a strategic move to improve governance within the broader Ethereum ecosystem, citing expectations for renewed growth in decentralized governance due to President Trump’s promise of regulatory clarity for the blockchain industry.
“2025 is the year we will make good governance the norm for all Ethereum protocols,” Yitong Zhang, co-founder of Agora, told CoinDesk.
Agora was founded in 2022 by Zhang, Charlie Feng and Kent Fenwick. The trio first began working on governance tools at Nouns DAO, one of the fastest-growing blockchain protocols to emerge from the DAO (decentralized autonomous organization) and NFT hype cycle of 2021.
The term “DAO” generally describes crypto communities governed by their token holders. They are a favorite of those who believe crypto’s decentralized philosophy can be a world-changing force, albeit a cumbersome way to run a pseudo-business. This created an opening for supporting projects like Agora.
Agora was founded on the principle that token governance is at the heart of the value of crypto protocols. It aims to provide user-friendly open source governance tools for DAOs like Uniswap and Optimism, both of which currently use Agora to organize token holders and hold governance votes.
Boardroom, which preceded Agora and pursues similar goals, has taken a more horizontal approach to blockchain governance. Boardroom has gradually evolved from an Agora-style CAD tooling software to a data feed, 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 are no plans to depreciate Boardroom,” according to Zhang. Instead, 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 fundamental strengths in decentralized coordination to advance a new type of community 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 CAD tools can help solve this problem, but it’s only one side of the equation. Another obstacle for DAOs is the lack of regulatory clarity, which leaves questions of legal liability open and makes it difficult for DAOs to determine how tokens should be issued and how decisions should be distributed between token holders and principals. developers of a platform.
“From a business perspective, DAOs are coming back in a very, very big way,” said Zhang, who says his own company has grown “10x” over the past year. “People haven’t noticed it yet because people are so traumatized by the DAO**t bullshit.”
The Trump administration has signaled plans to create clearer guidelines for issuing cryptocurrencies, sparking optimism among Zhang and some of his competitors.
“I think we’re finally going to get reasonable definitions for sufficient decentralization, security, and compliant ways to create a token,” Zhang said.
