Agora, a blockchain governance startup, is set to acquire its competitor Boardroom. The company framed the acquisition as a strategic move to enhance …

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. That’s 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.”

Several wallets are holding more than $100m worth of Trump and Melanie memecoins Around 60 wallets hold the biggest profits, reaching between $1m and $10m 80% of Trump and Melanie holders are investors with less than $1k worth of assets on Solana A majority of crypto...

MEXC, the world’s leading cryptocurrency trading platform, is excited to announce the launch of its second Launchpool initiative for the renowned blockchain project Aptos (APT). In addition to this initiative, MEXC is offering zero-fee spot and futures trading for...

Bitcoin continues to trade at record levels.
According to checkonchain data, Wednesday’s $130 billion bitcoin (BTC) volume was one of the highest in its history. Trade volume has soared since President Trump won the U.S. election at the start of November, doubling from a daily average of $65 billion.

The futures market (the total traded in futures contracts) yesterday saw $110 billion worth of volume. This was the fifth-highest futures trade volume recorded, only bettered on a handful of days in November and December last year.
The spot market saw roughly $15 billion of traded volume, which is approaching an all-time high. Meanwhile, bitcoin ETFs saw around $5 billion worth of trade volume, which is around half the all-time high seen in March 2024.
It is worth noting that options volume has not been included in the $130 billion daily volume figure, but it too is growing rapidly. According to Glassnode data, the total amount of options contracts traded in the last 24 hours is more than $3 billion.
With bitcoin is vying to be a global settlement layer, the more volume and liquidity that can be generated, the greater the asset’s chance of onboarding institutions that want to settle in billions of dollars at a moment’s notice.

Bitcoin USD on-chain data signals a shift in market dynamics as long-term holders transition from selling to accumulating. This change is evident in key metrics such as the Binary Coin Days Destroyed (CCD) and Long-Term Holder (LTH) activity indicators, highlighting...

Pegasystems Inc. (Pega) recently published the results of a new research exploring how workers feel about agentic AI. The joint research published with YouGov surveyed over 2,100 US and UK professional who use digital devices for their jobs. The research defined “AI...

The builders of Solana-based crypto derivatives exchange Ranger Protocol are jumping on the AI train, too, after raising $1.9 million from venture investors.

Ranger’s eponymous trading venue pools crypto perps (the most popular investment contract in DeFi for trading tokens like SOL) from multiple protocols to secure good deals for traders. Since launching in late December, it has facilitated $25 million in trades, a drop in the bucket of Solana’s total perps landscape.
The protocol is now planning to add new product lines that give customers access to AI-assisted trading strategies, co-founder Coby Lim told CoinDesk. A press release described vaults managed by AI agents who mix programmatic trading strategies with social media and data insights.
DeFAI (a portmanteau of DeFi and AI) has been taking off for months as enthusiasts of both buzzy tech fields experiment with mixing the two. AI agents can be set up to control their own crypto wallets, opening limitless possibilities.
“AI and DeFi are on a collision course,” co-founder Fathur Rahman (known commonly as Fa2) said. “Automation, predictive modeling, and intelligent execution will redefine trading. AI optimizes strategy, DeFi provides transparency, and together they unlock a new frontier of efficiency.”

Rahman said AI rollouts are expected in “the coming quarters.”
In the interim, Ranger’s rangers are working on pulling crypto perps from two more protocols, Adrena and Drift, to add to their current base of contracts from Jupiter and Flash. Their bet is Ranger’s aggregation strategies source deeper liquidity for institutional perps traders than any one exchange ever could.
That’s also what Ranger’s venture backers are counting on. Viktor Fischer of lead investor RockawayX called Ranger’s “smart order routing” a “critical step towards a vibrant Solana perpetuals market.”
Asymmetric, Big Brain Holdings, RISE Capital and Anagram joined RockawayX in the $1.9 million funding round, which closed in December at a $30 million valuation.

Bitcoin (BTC) surged past $106,000 on Thursday morning in the U.S. on reports that U.S. President Donald Trump will talk later today with Nayib Bukele, president of bitcoin-friendly nation state El Salvador.

Bitcoin advanced more than 3% to session highs in the minutes after the report, erasing early morning losses. It was up 2.2% over the past 24 hours.

Earlier this morning, prices started to climb as U.S. Senator Cynthia Lummis posted on social media to “stay tuned for 10:00 a.m.” Eastern Time, only to gave back most of the gains after reports that the Senate Banking Committee would vote to confirm Lummis as chair of the panel’s new digital assets subcommittee.
Fueling the gains was speculation that bitcoin and crypto regulation might be among the talking points between the two leaders. El Salvador has become as a nascent crypto hub under Bukele’s leadership. It was the first nation state to adopt BTC as legal tender in 2021 and accumulated over 6,000 BTC worth $622 million as a strategic reserve.

Trump said last year on the campaign trail that, if elected, he aims to position the U.S. as a global leader in the digital asset space. He also made several crypto-specific promises including creating a national stockpile, or strategic reserve, of bitcoin.
He’ll speak to Bukele at 3:30 p.m. ET.

A total of $226.53 million in crypto futures positions were liquidated on major centralized exchanges over the past 24 hours, according to data from CoinGlass. Of the liquidations, 76.89%—approximately $174.17 million—came from long positions, while $52.36 million...