Agora, a blockchain governance startup, is set to acquire its competitor’s 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 provide good governance to all protocols in Ethereum,” Agora co-founder Yitong Zhang told Coindesk.
Agora was founded in 2022 by Zhang, Charlie Feng and Kent Fenwick. The trio initially began working on governance tools on Nouns Dao, one of the buzzier blockchain protocols that emerged from 2021’s DAO (decentralized autonomous organization) and NFT hype cycle.
The term “DAO” generally describes cryptocommunities governed by their token holders. They are a favorite among those who believe that Crypto’s ethos of decentralization can be a world-changing force, albeit an unwieldy way to run a pseudo-business. This has created an opening for support projects such as Agora.
Agora was founded on the assumption that token management is central to the value of crypto-protocols. It aims to provide easy-to-use, open-source governance tools for DAOs such as UNISWAP and Optimism, both of which currently use Agora to organize token holders and hold governance votes.
Boardroom, which preceded Agora and has similar goals, took a more horizontal approach to blockchain governance. The boardroom has gradually transitioned from an Agora-style DAO tool software to a data feed-like “Bloomberg” for Crypto Governance Data.
Agora declined to disclose how much it paid to acquire the boardroom. Boardroom’s employees have been offered roles at Agora, and Boardroom’s founder, Kevin Nielsen, will remain as an advisor. “There is no plan to write off” the boardroom, according to Zhang. Rather, the Agora team will keep both platforms running and will work with users to determine how the tools can 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 pitched as a way to harness blockchain’s core strengths of decentralized coordination to foster a new kind of community-owned enterprise, but they have been implemented in different ways and with varying degrees of success.
Many DAOs have floundered due to organizational difficulties; Coordinating thousands of token holders around a single goal can be difficult. Improving DAO tools can help tackle this, but that’s only one side of the equation. Another barrier to DAOs has been a lack of regulatory clarity, which has left open questions of legal liability and made it difficult for DAOs to determine how tokens should be issued and how decisions should be split between token holders and a platform’s core developers.
“From a business perspective, Daos is coming back in a really, really big way,” said Zhang, who says his own business has grown “10x” in the past year. “People haven’t noticed yet because people have so much trauma over Dao Bulls**t.”
The Trump administration has signaled its intention to create clearer guidelines for cryptocurrency issuance, prompting optimism among Zhang and some of his competitors.
“I think we’re finally getting reasonable definitions for sufficient decentralization, security, and compatible ways to make a token,” Zhang said. “
