Relying on voters holding tokens to manage a decentralized protocol can get messy. Conversations often unfold in siled channels such as his Discord and Telegram, and the process for making important decisions like treasury allocations and governance rules is inefficient and disjointed. “It has a reputation for being chaotic,” said Agora co-founder Yitong Zhang. luck.
Agora, which just raised $5 million in a seed round, is a cross-chain platform that provides a new standard of governance tools to help protocols organize voting systems. Uniswap, Optimism, and Nouns are some of the early customers. Chan said Agora means “all the benefits of offering shares directly on the internet without the disruption.”
Agora's seed round was led by Haun Ventures, with participation from Coinbase Ventures, Seed Club Ventures, Consensys Ventures, and others.
Mr. Zhang was previously a designer at Coinbase. His co-founders, Charlie Fenn and Kent Fenwick, came from Clearco, a multibillion-dollar fintech company co-founded by Fenwick, where Fenwick was an engineering executive.
“With this new funding, we will be able to double down on our go-to-market efforts and product investments. The capital injection will enable us to meet new demand,” said Zhang, adding that Agora He added that demand has increased significantly.
Agora said in a statement that with the latest funding, it will “continue to build for the long term and double down on shipping all of our software as MIT-licensed public goods that advance our ecosystem.” The startup's open source infrastructure also means that a variety of developers, governance tool teams, and startups are contributing to the development of the API.
Agora says token-backed voting and collective governance is the internet's best way to move it “out of the walled garden” – from private companies to common protocols. I believe.
The Web2 era may have mastered private apps, but collective protocols are still in their infancy. While static traditional protocols like HTTP require little or no management, cryptographic protocols are constantly evolving ecosystems that require consensus from a complex set of stakeholders. As a result, the protocol could be perceived as “fundamentally less effective” than stock management apps (private companies), Chan said.
In Agora's view, the main reason for this is a lack of investment in tools.
“That's why we launched Agora, making it our top priority to build MIT-licensed software to run our protocols. The outcome of this undertaking is uncertain and the work is difficult, but we believe we can achieve our goals and timing. We believe this is the right thing to do,” the company said in a statement.
