Introducing Agora
Background
The Internet of today is not what we thought it was going to be. Where we hoped for it to be free as in freedom, it is now free as in free trial sponsored by FAANG. The Internet today is gratis, but not libre.
We believe that token-powered protocols are our best bet to move more of the Internet out of walled gardens and into globally accessible, composable, and community-owned protocols . With this novel structure, for the first time in history, we have well-defined ways to improve protocols, and the in-network incentives to pay for these improvements. The combination of these properties creates a path for an increased range and rate of technological progress to move from private enterprises to common protocols.
While token-backed protocols give us a glimpse into the future of software, they also pose new challenges: our society knows how to run private apps well, but has never run collective protocols before. Where traditional protocols like HTTP and SMTP are stateless and static, and require little to no management – crypto protocols are stateful, constantly evolving, and require consensus from a complex array of stakeholders to move forward.
As a result, many view token-governed protocols as fundamentally less effective than equity-governed apps (aka private companies).
Our contrarian belief is that because of its programmable nature, well-designed token governance can in fact be orders of magnitude more effective and more expansive than that of traditional companies. The key factor holding this new model back is the lack of investment in tooling. After all, equity companies have a hundred years of muscle memory around norms and billions of dollars in processes, infrastructure, and tooling behind them.
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.
Introducing Agora
With Agora, we're reversing the story on the effectiveness of collectively-governed protocols by building a new standard of governance tooling – from governor contracts to voting application, and much beyond.
And we’re not alone in this – because we’re open source, we’re joined by ethos-aligned indie developers, governance tooling teams, and startups who’ve all contributed to our repos or built around our API by sending over 13m requests.
Today, we’re doubling down on this mission with $5M in new funding led by Haun Ventures, with participation from Seed Club Ventures, Coinbase Ventures, Consensys Ventures, Sina Habibian, Balaji Srinivasan, Will Price, Viktor Bunin, Tim Beiko, Dan Romero, Eva Beylin, and many more – all of whom believe as we do in the venture outcome of building public goods, thanks to programs like RPGF.
This new funding comes in addition to a Backstop Grant we’ve received from the Optimism Foundation for being among the earliest adopters of building for RPGF and enables us to double down on being fully MIT licensed, as well as support from various communities using Agora like Uniswap, ENS, Lyra, and Nouns.
With this new resourcing, we’ll continue to build for the long term, and double down on shipping all our software as open source public goods that advance our ecosystem. We've got quite a lot started already, but there's much more to the story here, and we'd be honored if you'd join us in telling it.
To start using Agora for your community, head to agora.xyz/deploy to get started!