Relying on token-holding voters to govern decentralized protocols can be messy. Conversations often unfold in siloed channels, like Discord or Telegram, and the process for making important decisions such as treasury allocation or governance rules are inefficient and splintered. “It’s had this reputation of being chaotic,” Agora’s co-founder Yitong Zhang told Fortune.
Agora, which just raised a $5 million seed round, is a cross-chain platform that offers a new standard of governance tools to help protocols organize their voting systems. Uniswap, Optimism and Nouns are among a few of its earliest customers. Zhang says Agora means “you can have all the benefits of having your equity directly on the internet without the chaos.”
Agora’s seed round was led by Haun Ventures, with participation from Coinbase Ventures, Seed Club Ventures, and Consensys Ventures, among others.
Zhang was previously a designer at Coinbase. His co-founders Charlie Feng and Kent Fenwick come from multibillion-dollar fintech Clearco, which Feng co-founded, and where Fenwick was an engineering executive.
“With this new fundraise, we can really double down on our go-to-market effort, and investing in our product …. The injection of capital will allow us to keep up with the new demand,” said Zhang, adding that Agora has seen a sizable uptick in demand in the last quarter.
With the latest funding, Agora says it will continue to “build for the long term, and double down on shipping all our software as MIT-licensed public goods that advance our ecosystem,” it said in a statement. The startup’s open source infrastructure has also meant various developers, governance tooling teams, and startups have contributed to the development of the API.
Agora believes that token-backed voting and collective governance are the internet’s best way of moving the internet “out of walled gardens”—transitioning the internet from private enterprises to common protocols.
While the Web2-era may have mastered private apps, collective protocols are in their infancy. Where static, traditional protocols like HTTP require little to no management, crypto protocols are constantly evolving ecosystems, and require consensus from a complex array of stakeholders. As a result, Zhang says protocols may be perceived as “fundamentally less effective” than equity-governed apps (private companies).
The main reason for this, in Agora’s view, is a lack of investment in tooling.
“That’s why we started Agora to make building MIT-licensed software for running protocols our first and only priority. The outcome of this venture is uncertain and the work is difficult, but we believe the goal and timing is right,” the company said in a statement.
