Boardroom is the read layer of DAO governance: not a place you cast a vote, but the API that other apps query to show you the vote. Where an interface like Agora or Tally / Cactus runs a single DAO's proposals, Boardroom reads across the whole field – on-chain Governor votes and off-chain Snapshot proposals from 300+ protocols – and serves the normalized result through one API and SDK. CoinDesk described what it became as a “Bloomberg” for crypto governance data. Launched as a governance dashboard in 2020 (a $2.2M seed led by Standard Crypto followed that October), it was acquired by Agora in January 2025.
Governance data is fragmented by construction. Every DAO runs its own contracts – a separate OpenZeppelin Governor deployment here, a Snapshot space there – each with its own address, schema and quirks. To answer a question as simple as “what proposals are open right now across the DAOs I hold” you would otherwise index dozens of contracts yourself. Boardroom does that indexing once and exposes it as a uniform feed: proposals and their states, vote tallies, delegates and their voting history, and per-protocol metadata, all through a documented API and SDK. Its own figures put coverage at more than two million delegates across 300-plus protocols (per Agora).
Boardroom did not start as infrastructure. It launched as a user-facing governance dashboard – an Agora-style place to browse and track proposals – and gradually transitioned into a data feed sitting behind other products. That pivot is the whole story: rather than competing for the end-user's attention with every other governance UI, Boardroom became the plumbing those UIs run on, so wallets and governance apps could display proposals and delegate activity without each building its own multi-protocol indexer. It is the difference between selling the newspaper and selling the wire service.
The founders first pitched the idea at ETHSanFrancisco in 2018 under the name Kora, then built governance and ecosystem tooling at TQ Tezos and Parity before returning to it in 2020 (Boardroom). Boardroom announced itself on 30 July 2020 as a governance portal for token holders and for delegates, whom it called protocol politicians, with an SDK planned for exchanges, wallets and custodians that wanted to show governance data without integrating each protocol separately; the portal's alpha opened on 6 August with early support from the MetaCartel community (Boardroom).
The $2.2m seed followed in October, led by Standard Crypto with Variant, CoinFund, IDEO CoLab Ventures, Framework Ventures and Slow Ventures (Boardroom). Its own account of what came after is a governance dashboard in 2021, Boardroom V2 and a developer SDK in 2022, and more than 350 communities connected by the time it joined Agora (Boardroom).
Boardroom also published a newsletter on DAO governance for almost five years. It began in March 2020 as the Distributed Governance Report and became the Boardroom Newsletter that July. From 2021 it ran weekly digests under several names: Rock the Vote, Stateless Weekly and This Week in DAOs in 2021, then This Week in Governance, 109 issues from April 2022 to July 2024. The archive holds 216 posts; the last, on 23 January 2025, announced the Agora deal (archive). Its early issues record the first weeks of on-chain governance at Compound. In 2024 the newsletter also carried Boardroom's service work: it wrote governance content and kept a knowledge base for Lido's delegate programme (Boardroom), and added ZKsync's governance contracts to its dashboard when they went live in September 2024 (Boardroom).
On 23 January 2025 Agora – the on-chain voting platform behind Optimism, Uniswap and ENS – acquired Boardroom, folding a read-side data layer beneath its write-side voting stack. Terms were undisclosed; founder Kevin Nielsen stayed on as an advisor, and Agora's co-founder said “there's no plan to deprecate” Boardroom, keeping both platforms running while integrating them (Agora's announcement; Boardroom's). The deal was one marker of a wider 2025–26 consolidation of governance tooling – the same window in which Tally wound its hosted product down into Cactus – as a once-crowded vendor field contracted toward a few full-stack providers.
That commitment dates to January 2025, and it has held for only half the product. Measured on 22 August 2026 and re-measured unchanged nineteen days later on 10 September: boardroom.io answers HTTP 200 from Netlify, but what it returns is a 4,187-byte single-page-app shell, and the app that shell boots renders “Something went wrong.” on every data-bearing route – the front page and the /projects directory alike. Only the routes that need no data render: the 404 page comes up cleanly, chrome and all. The cause is reproducible outside the browser, and it is a switch rather than a wall.
The Alchemy RPC endpoint compiled into the app’s own JavaScript bundle answers 403 with “ETH_MAINNET is not enabled for this app” – not a revoked or expired key, but a still-registered Alchemy app with the Ethereum mainnet network switched off, whose error even names the dashboard page that would switch it back on. The client throws while configuring chains and never reaches Boardroom’s own API at all. Both readings, 22 August and 10 September, returned that error verbatim, so whatever disabled the network has gone unattended for at least nineteen days. The supporting surfaces have gone too: home.boardroom.io, the developer portal the app's own footer links to, returns Framer's “Site Not Found”, and the public bug tracker at roadmap.boardroom.info redirects to its SaaS vendor's marketing homepage.
The data layer is a different story, and the distinction is the whole point. api.boardroom.info is still served and still authenticating – /v1/protocols returns 401 Unauthorized to a request with no key and 403 to one with a bad key, which is a live API refusing a caller rather than a dead host – and the API documentation is up. The acquirer is unambiguously healthy: vote.optimism.io, Agora's flagship deployment, was serving Optimism's voting cycle #57 on the same day. So the honest reading of “no plan to deprecate” is that the wire service survived the acquisition and the newspaper did not. Cite Boardroom as an API a developer integrates; do not send a reader to boardroom.io expecting to browse governance.
This is also a lesson in how tool liveness gets checked, and it generalises past Boardroom. Every automated test that can be run against the Boardroom citations on this page passes: the URLs resolve, the status codes are 200, the content type is text/html. A single-page app serves its shell before it knows whether it can fetch anything, so a product can be broken for months while every link to it stays green – and the only way to see it is to load the app and look, or to call the service it depends on. The wider failure class is covered on DAO tooling discontinuity.
It helps to separate the layers. Snapshot and Agora/Tally are write surfaces – where a vote is actually cast, off-chain or on. DeepDAO is the discovery-and-treasury dataset (“CoinMarketCap for DAOs”), and Karma scores delegate accountability. Boardroom is the general-purpose read API under all of it: the normalized governance feed a third-party app queries when it wants to render proposals and votes it did not itself index. A DAO doesn't “use Boardroom to govern” so much as the tools around it use Boardroom to stay informed. See the tooling-stack map for how the read and write layers fit together.
An aggregator like Boardroom is necessary because governance data is scattered across hundreds of independent contracts with no common read surface – someone has to index them all and sell the unified feed. A caper narrows that problem at the source: a caper's proposals, votes and execution are native state on the DAO's own on-chain component, so the canonical record of who proposed what and how it resolved is read directly from the ledger, not reconstructed by a third party. That doesn't abolish the case for aggregation – anyone comparing many capers at once would still want an index across them – but it moves the source of truth into the protocol itself, where no vendor's database sits between a member and the state that governs their stake. Read-layer plumbing is still useful; it just isn't where a caper's governance lives.