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.”

• Wix has announced a new integration with YouTube Shopping
• YouTube Shopping allows people to purchase products directly through YouTube videos
• The feature is available to creators in specific countries

Wix, one of the best website builders on the market, has announced a new integration with YouTube Shopping, giving store owners a new and popular avenue to sell their products, while also expanding YouTube’s social shopping features.

YouTube Shopping is a relatively new service (first announced in 2021) that allows YouTube creators to tag products within their videos. That way, viewers can easily purchase the items directly from the platform.

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Javier Milei’s government is weighing up a proposal for Argentina to leave the Paris agreement, days after Donald Trump announced the US would exit the world’s key accord on climate change. 

While a final decision has yet to be made, two people familiar with the discussions said Argentina was likely to follow in the US’s footsteps, a move that would make it just the second country to quit the agreement signed by almost 200 nations.

Senior officials are studying an internal memo recommending an exit, said people briefed on the situation, after the country withdrew negotiators from last year’s COP29 climate summit and said it was re-evaluating its international commitments on the environment.

Civil servants were seeking to dissuade Milei’s team from leaving the agreement, the people said. One Argentine diplomat said Milei would make the final decision and that “it seems very likely that we will end up leaving”.

A departure, if agreed, would mark a major blow to global efforts to address climate change. The agreement aims to limit global temperature rises to well below 2C and ideally to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels.

The environmental division of Argentina’s interior ministry did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The libertarian leader, who denies that humans are a cause of climate change, on Thursday condemned the global environmental movement in a speech to the World Economic Forum in Davos.

“Wokeism has perverted the basic idea of preserving the environment for the enjoyment of human beings, and turned it into a fanatical environmentalism where human beings are a cancer that must be eliminated, and economic development is little less than a crime against nature,” he said.

On Monday, Trump signed an executive order to pull the US from the Paris agreement for a second time, having previously left during his first term. No other country has left the 2015 accord.

Exiting the Paris agreement would require congressional approval in Argentina, but Milei has often bypassed congress via emergency decrees during his presidency.

Last year was the hottest on record, with scientists saying the world is increasingly off track to meet the temperature goals set out in the accord. 

A withdrawal could affect the EU-Mercosur trade agreement concluded in December between Europe and Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay, which specifies that parties can suspend the trade deal if one of the signatories leaves the Paris accord. 

A diplomat said: “The technical staff in the ministry are trying to explain that while Trump can do what he wants, for Argentina it would bring consequences.” 

They also cited potential complications for Argentina’s recently launched bid to join the OECD, which advocates environmental policy standards for members.

Critics have argued that Argentina would also risk losing access to climate-linked international financing streams, after receiving billions in such funding, and could be excluded from global carbon markets in future.

Countries are due to submit updated climate plans next month under the Paris accord, although many are expected to miss the deadline.

Microsoft promised a new game announcement at its Xbox Developer Direct event, and that game turned out to be Ninja Gaiden 4. The new entry in the long-running franchise is being co-developed by Team Ninja along with Platinum Games, the team behind action games like Bayonetta and Nier: Automata. Though no release date was announced, the game will be coming to Xbox, and will be available via Game Pass.

While the Ninja Gaiden franchise has been around since the late ‘80s, it entered into a new era on the Xbox with the bloody, and tough-as-nails Ninja Gaiden on Xbox in 2004. That version, developed by Team Ninja, was ported to a handful of other consoles and also received a number of sequels. Based on the debut trailer, the new game looks to continue the dark action started with the 2004 release, but with even faster gameplay.

Roli on Thursday announced its latest educational product at the NAAM audio show in Anaheim. The simply named Roli Piano builds on products like the Roli Airwave and Piano M, more than doubling the latter’s key count to 49.

The Piano is much like its predecessor in most ways, with MIDI keys that light up and sync with an instructional app played back on a phone or tablet. The Airwave, meanwhile, adds hand tracking into the mix, creating gesture-based sounds.

The new instrument is pricey, at $599, well over double the Piano M’s current $249 price point. The London-based music tech startup is offering up the larger model at $399 for a limited time “super early bird special.”

And, of course, it wouldn’t be a 2025 product launch without some mention of generative AI. That arrives by way of the newly announced Piano AI Assistitant, which the company refers to as, “the first step in using generative AI to make learning to play easier, more intuitive and more fun than ever before.”

The Assistant, which is rolling out as part of the Piano launch, aims to further instruction, while adding music theory into the mix.

Over the past year, the Piano line has become Roli’s primary focus. The pivot toward educational products makes sense for the company, which filed for bankruptcy back in 2021. Products like the Seaboard and Blocks were always cool and clever, but remained niche in the music world.

Music education, on the other hand, offers massive market potential for a smaller hardware maker.

The Department for Work & Pensions has issued an urgent warning after new figures revealed the number of pensioners pushed in poverty continues to rise.

Around 800,000 of those affected are missing out on a crucial benefit which could help top up income and provide a yearly boost worth £3,900.

Around 800,000 people are missing out on Pension Credit worth an average of £3,900 per year

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