Agora, a blockchain governance startup, is set to acquire its competitor Boardroom. The company framed the acquisition as a strategic move to enhance 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 in Ethereum,” Agora co-founder Yitong Zhang told CoinDesk.
Agora was founded in 2022 by Zhang, Charlie Feng, and Kent Fenwick. The trio initially started working on governance tooling at Nouns DAO, one of the buzzier blockchain protocols to emerge from 2021's DAO (decentralized autonomous organization) and NFT hype cycle.
The term “DAO” generally describes crypto communities that are governed by their token holders. They‘re a favorite among those who believe crypto’s decentralization ethos can be a world-changing force, albeit an unwieldy way to run a pseudo-company. Thats created an opening for support 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 like Uniswap and Optimism, which both currently use Agora to organize token holders and hold governance votes.
Boardroom, which predated Agora and has similar goals, took a more horizontal approach to blockchain governance. Boardroom has gradually transitioned from an Agora-style DAO 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's employees have been offered roles at Agora, and Boardroom's founder, Kevin Nielsen, will remain as an advisor. “There's no plan to deprecate” Boardroom, according to Zhang. Rather, the Agora team will keep both platforms running and will work with users to determine how the tools might gradually be 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 leverage blockchain's core strengths in decentralized coordination to advance a new kind of community-owned company, but they've been implemented in various ways and to varying degrees of success.
Many DAOs have floundered due to organizational difficulties; it can be hard to coordinate thousands of token-holders around a single goal. Improving DAO tooling can help to address this, but it is only one side of the equation. Another barrier for DAOs has been a lack of regulatory clarity, which has left open questions of legal liability and has made it difficult for DAOs to determine how tokens should be issued, and how decisions should be divided between token holders and a platform's core developers.
“From a business perspective, DAOs are coming back in a really, really large way,” said Zhang, who says his own business has grown “10X” over 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, which has led to optimism among Zhang and some of his competitors.
“I think we're gonna finally get reasonable definitions for sufficient decentralization, security, and compliant ways of doing a token,” said Zhang.