Agora: Enabling great governance

Transcript

This is governance shouldn't be a riveting space. If your governance is too exciting, it's probably because something is wrong. More voting does not equal better governance, right? Like better decision-m is actually better governance. More decentralization sometimes means less control for the team, but it doesn't necessarily mean more voting for the community, right? The community can vote very little, but have a lot of control. Probably good. It's like non-excludable, non-rivalist. And like if you apply those definitions to most things that are claiming to be public goods, you're like, wait, this is totally excludable and totally can well rival sometimes software is not as risk, but it's certainly very excludable.

[Music] Welcome to ecosystem project demo where we dive deep into projects supporting Ethereum ecosystem. [Music] This is episode 22 brought to you by ECH Institute. I'm your host Puja Ranjan joined by Akash and from Ethereum Catholicis. Today we are diving into onchain governance with the team behind Agora a platform that's helping protocol like unis swap, optimism and etheri decentralized without writing a single line of code. We'll explore what makes Agora different from existing governance projects, how it balances simplicity and

power, and why building trustworthy governance system might be one of the most important public goods in Web3 World. To break it all down for us, we are joined by the co-founder Yang Rang. Welcome Yang. Hey, it's good to be here and uh lovely being here. I'm super excited to chat with you guys. Thank you so much for taking our time and we are also looking forward to learn more about Agora. But before we get into Agora the project, it would be interesting for us to learn a little bit more about you, may you want to share about your professional background, how you find Ethereum or the web3 world in general and how you came up with the project Agora.

Sounds good. So I started Agora in 2022 with my two co-founders Charlie and Kent. And before that, I worked four years at Coinbase as a product designer and really came into crypto via Ethereum in 2017. Like a lot of people, I bought a little bit of ETH on Coinbase and was like, "Oh, this stuff goes up. Oh, interesting." Okay. Right. So, I watched it go up from like, you know, like like a little to a lot to like a lot a lot. And I was like, I distinctly remember being on this like road trip to Yusede with a couple of friends and they were driving and I just kept pulling up the Coin Pace app and refreshing the price and I was like, "Guy, it's gone up

again. What is going on?" And then they were like looking at me like, "Okay, it's like really weird." And I was like, "You're right. I can't explain why this goes up or what it does." So I went home and started reading like I read the white paper and the yellow paper and then write like and started because there's not a lot of content back then right so I just like started looking into stuff I was like oh wait a minute this is like super interesting right this is like this is fundamentally really disruptive technology in the way that like you know I think disruption is like a very overused word today everything is disruptive that disruptive this but and when you really think about it there aren't actually many new technologies that are truly disruptive.

Many of the new technologies are sustaining technologies, right? They sort of like do something better, faster. It sustains sort of the the status quo, but just makes like aspect of it much better. But really, crypto and Ethereum in particular is sort of this very fundamentally disruptive technology that changes the way that economics, business, and sort of incentives work. And so that to me was sort of really exciting. And so I started trying to build some stuff in Ethereum in 2017 and this was sort of like very early and like oh man it's actually really hard to build anything.

And so like I was trying to build coin market cap for cryptokitties. And then I was like so excited about this and I was like wait a minute like cryptokitt is going to zero. Like it doesn't really make any sense. And I was like oh no but I'm still really excited about the space and I want to work in it. Where can I do that? And so I pulled out my phone looked at the Coinbase app again and I was like I guess this is where I'll go. So then I joined Coinbase in 20 2018 and was there for four years. Worked on a variety of things from the wallet app, the consumer retail app to the derivatives product to the staking product. And really in 2022 is when I felt like whoa like there's like stuff happening in crypto again. It's not just ICOs. Oh there's you know still a lot of

tokens but there were like DeFi, there was NFTTS, there was Dows and I was like this is it, right? this is like the arrival of the utility phase of crypto where you can build stuff on top of crypto that's not just financial assets. And so I left, grabbed my friends Charlie and Kent and we started Agora. And Agora is sort of this idea that a tokens have to mean something, right? It's sort of this like, you know, you work on exchange long enough, you're like, what are these things that people are trading and you really think about things, it's like, oh no, these a lot of these tokens don't mean anything. They don't mean anything. They have they don't they're not attached to anything.

People are just trading these things back and for forth because they think that like that's a little bit of the the greater sucker kind of uh thesis of like oh well I'll just sell it to somebody else. It doesn't have to mean anything. And that was bad, right? It's like hey the tokens in crypto should mean something like they should have real sound attachment to the underlying protocols. They should grant rights to the holders. There should be controls right around like what these things do. you shouldn't be able to like the project shouldn't be able to rug its holders. There's a lot of stuff that's like like I feel like this is sort of like the Ethereum and the crypto that we're here for and token voting and governance is sort of our first product because this is sort of effectively when you talk about governance what the most

practical use case is but really we think of Agora as sort of like a broad a broader general governance product to sort of give tokens meaning and voting is our first product. So I'll pause there real quick. Happy to keep diving into any of these parts but also happy to turn it back to you. Thank you so much for this introduction. Um Nang I really can connect with you. You rightly mentioned at the time of 2016 2017 there was not much of information available. I also kind of happened to join the ecosystem the same way with starting to write about what's going on in Ethereum ecosystem. Ethereum is pretty challenging at the same time very interesting. So people who are

interested in learning more about and open to accept these challenges are always welcome to the ecosystem. I loved your journey throughout like uh getting into Coinbase working on different projects and then coming up with the products which can actually add value the token that can actually have some meaning to it. It it's something good for the ecosystem. So I'm so looking forward to learn more about it. You mentioned that the project is mostly about governance. We talk about how we can manage that is something we can relate from the real world the web two world as well. Would you mind sharing a little bit about what were the main issues that you thought that u needed to be solved in web3 world and what was

like maybe the most underestimated issue that Agora would be solving in the world of web 3 governance. Yeah, I mean look I have two tiers of answer for this. So let me start with a higher level answer versus the like it's what I said about sort of like tokens meaning something right like exchanges are by far the largest business in crypto and the number one product that exchanges offer is token trading it's the reality is that like the crypto space is 95% token trading and it's like so it's like there's the whole supply chain of crypto activity is built around token issuance token trading like leverage token trading borrow and lend tokens it's all comes back to tokens.

And so like, all right, well, like tokens are cool. Tokens are sort of like, you know, the the number one practical product that like blockchains offer to most people. And then you're like, okay, well, like what are these tokens? And so like if you buy one Bitcoin, like you know exactly what Bitcoin is. It like it's very simple, right? It's sort of this provably scarce asset class. Doesn't do much, but it's very transparent. you buy Ethereum and you're like okay well it's sort of this like like a oil like commodity where like in order to use the service you have to like use like sort of in order to use the compute provided by Ethereum you have to spend I mean it's literally called gas right to use it so there's a real meaning to the token and then you

go down the stack and you're like okay what does having like you know an application token mean like what does having unis swap tokens mean and you're like oh well okay well there's like you know some voting rights in UDA swap and I think there's a fee switch. Okay, that's not bad. And then you go down a little bit and you look at the some of the others project that I will not name and you look at the token it's like what does this token actually do besides sharing the same name as the project underneath and the answer like scarily often is nothing right like um and that's that's not good if the product that we're offering to folks is sort of this like asset class that really like a lot of times mean nothing that's effectively like these are effectively memes right like I I think that we have

went through this huge wave of meme coins that everybody was really not excited excited about, but like memecoins have always been around. Some of them just didn't look like meme coins. And so then you're like, okay, well then the problem that Agora is really solving is to like move the asset class of tokens forward in a way makes them like legit assets, right? Like they're not not all tokens are going to go up, but all tokens deserve a level of transparency or a level of controls. And these are what this is why like regulation in the real world exists for securities, right? It's because you want like a level playing field, transparency for to like for buyers and sort of like the the the um some level of control so that there's no fraud in the system. And

that's kind of the very high level problem that we're solving. Very practically though like what Agora solves is sort of this like very funny specific problem of token voting, right? So token voting is just a way that governance has been done and continues to be done for most projects. And like I think Vitalic has written enough blog posts about the fact that token voting is not great. But at the same time I think the answer isn't necessarily like oh no we just can't do any token voting because the reality is that like people just do it. And so we just have to get a lot better at this too. And so one of the things you notice is that like everybody will like begrudgingly go into token voting and they will complain about to how coding token voting is bad.

And then you look at like what are these problems that caused token votings to be bad? Well, one of them is that like everybody just copy paste the voting system of the like last company, right? That that like they saw with the good token price and that must be a good voting system. And very few people are sort of from scratch thinking about like what their governance system ought to be. And and there's a good reason for this, which is people are very scared to roll their own governance contracts. It's like dangerous, right? it's sort of like they like they don't want to mess with it and they want to spend all their protocol engineering time on their actual product. And so what we did at Agora is we ho we offer this very modular governance contract that lets people sort of like configure the right

governance system for their project. So every project is a little different. Every governance system is going to be a little different. And we let folks configure the governance system they want using Agora in a safe standardized way. And what really this means concretely for a lot of projects is that we enable them to walk through this path of progressive decentralization. So, you know, when you're really young as a project, you don't want to be fully decentralized, everybody in their grandma voting on everything. You probably want to have like a firm hand of control from the team during the project asking for community input where is needed. And then over time as the project matures as your stakeholders learn and grow you can delegate more and more to the community and increase sort

of that like decentralization increasing sophistication of the governance system and we help projects go through that journey at Agora of progressive decentralization. So I'll pause here real quick. I know I've been blabbing for a while. Happy to dig into any of this stuff more in depth too. Yes, we will definitely get in depth on some of the terms that we have used here such as progressive decentralization. But before we go there, I would love to hear from you like as you mentioned that every project has its own way of managing the governance and things like that. Here Agora promises end toend governance without any code. How does that actually work? Maybe if you can demo it uh for the team implementing it today.

Yeah, sure. Let me share a quick presentation that we usually give to projects which will be pretty short and I'll give you sort of a sense of what it's like working with us and I'll give you a practical demo of a live application. So getting started with governance with Agora what does that mean? So the problem that we try to solve projects is it's this sort of this co-star problem right like folks want to launch governance build community but they also want to avoid slowing down the team by btocracy. And so what we do is we help projects uh make good governance their competitive advantage. What does it mean? It means sharing control with the right people at the right time.

Means voting voting only on what matters and delegating the rest. And it means creating shared upside with your token. Practically how we work for projects is that we'll come in at the strategy level and then we have an amazing CX team who will come and understand your strategy and then work with you on your token launch to make sure that the at the time of token launch and voting power is appropriately distributed. We'll work with you to activate your governance, get the right people involved, get your initial momentum going and then we'll help you grow your community and progressively decentralize at the end.

We also work with tons of lawyers to make sure that whatever we are doing on governance is always up to date with the latest regulatory requirements in the USA so that projects are always like working towards sufficient decentralization from a regulation perspective and that's why Agora is the governance solution of choice by top protocols and the thing that makes Agora sort of very unique is that we're fully open source that means that you are never locked in both our application and our smart contracts are fully open source you're free to contribute. You're free to fork. Of course, our job is to, you know, be such a good team to work with that you never feel like you have to, but it's it's possible. So, what does that mean concretely though when you work with us? So, let me explain.

Let me share something else. So, this is what an Agora deployment looks like. In this case, we are specifically looking at the optimism deployment of Agora. And our team will work with any uh project to go deploy one of these as well. And so some of the what makes Agora really unique is that of course like you come here and you see all the proposals right which is the lifeblood of most governance communities. It's somebody saying hey I want to prop I want to do something to read like this. So, of course, we offer all of the standard proposal features where you can come here. You can sort of create an action that you would like to do and then you can visualize like do people like what

I'm doing, people not like what I'm doing. You can see who's voted, who hasn't voted. That's the standard stuff that you expect out of a governance tool. But what Agora does that's very unique is that we have a modular governor that lets you add and remove functionality according to what your community needs. For example, in Optimism's case, they're saying, "Hey, actually for important protocol upgrades, we believe that the most like qualified person to prop like a propose and evaluate the soundness of this proposal is just the optimism team." And so for these proposals, they are always going to pass optimistically unless there is a sufficiently high number of people who are opposed to it.

So here's an example. They re optimism recently put up a maintenance upgrade for absolute pre-state updates for its activation and blob pre-image fix. As you can tell, I have no idea what this means. Most people probably have no idea what this means. But what's cool is that like, hey, the optimism team is pretty cognizant of this. What this means is that like this proposal will always be approved because they they believe that this category of proposal simply is beyond the technical competency of most their voters. But they still say, "Okay, well, if 12% of the votable supply of OP is against, then this will not go through." So they still let the community like a like a veto um if this is something they really dislike. And so currently only 1% is against and

therefore this is passing well above the the limit. And so I don't know why people are against honestly. I feel like people are kind of spamming against votes for not really good reasons. But as you can see, we are very far from the quorum of against votes needed for this to be a post. Similarly, like what optimism does a lot is sort of like, hey, like we think that a a category of decisions we would like to make is elections, right? So like instead of saying everybody on Instagram should vote on every damn thing, we're going to say, hey, there are experts that we want to elect that they are going to run a part of our governance system. How do we do this? We're going to have multiple choice selections. And this is again a

unique feature enabled by Agora where folks can instead of casting 12 votes for 12 different people, yes, no, we can simply cast one vote of a multiple choice. So we can say, hey, we're going to elect a cohort of security council members. Who among these folks do we want to do elect? And if you get a little nerdy here, we have many types of proposals uh multiple choice. We can say top choices which is let's say that's the top six ad choices will be approved or we can do threshold based which is like we don't care how many choices are approved as long as people have this number of votes then they will pass. So we give folks a lot of sophistication when it comes to the ability to post.

And so as you can see this sort of like makes certain types of decisions, certain types of votes which reduces the burden both on the team and the community. Has some elements of decentralization but also has some element of centralization where appropriate. And then of course you can see all the delegates who are engaged in your community. And if you're really nerdy, you can turn on the table view and start really thinking through like, okay, like who are the people who have the most voting power and I want to think about the people who like really care about treasury management. So you can start like really digging into the folks that you want to see. And the last thing that I think is really cool here

that I'm going to show you guys is the admin dashboard. This admin dashboard is obviously a little hidden, but it's not a total secret. So anybody can come see this but only the manager can edit these settings. So the admin dashboard is really what we give protocol teams the fine grain control over their governance system. So for example we can folks can edit the voting power and the voting delay. They can edit the manager and the admin address or set it to or set or burn these addresses. So one thing that we uniquely allow projects to do is that we allow folks to have what we call manager only mode which is that it's only c a certain approved address proposed and then that sort of keeps things like you know like relatively

centralized in the beginning and then at any time we can resend the manager mode such that it um uh it can be eventually fully decentralized to community. We also have an admin address which allows projects to emergency cancel proposals if there are bugs or attacks. And then the last thing that I'll I'll show that's really cool is that we have this thing called proposal types. And proposal types came from a place where we realize that like not everything should be the same level of difficulty. If I'm trying to send a hundred of tokens to someone, it should be very different level of difficulty than trying to send like 10 million tokens.

Why are these things the same kind of vote? In most normal organizations, they would not be the same process. So why should it be on chain and so therefore we created these proposal types where we can say hey like there are multiple types of proposals default super majority optimistic and these types apply to different votes and then they have different difficulty levels. So by default 30% quorum have has to be met and then 51% of the votes have to be four. But for a super majority, actually we require 76% of the votes to be four.

So we really want high alignment. And for optimistic, which I just showed you, this passes by default unless a certain number of people are opposed. So this is sort of a little bit of a there's like more stuff here that I can bore you with, but this is sort of really the the goal of Agora, right? It's sort of that like how do we help our communities make uh turn governance into their competitive advantage? Well, it's through this sort of very fine grain control system that lets folks like have the right level of centralization at the right places and the right decentralization of the right places and then allow folks to have a smooth ramp towards more decentralization. So that's the quick overview that's pretty fascinating. I have

noticed that you have worked with the big projects of the ecosystem unis swap optimism and all. I'm wondering with the experience working of these projects what are the lessons learned that may have helped in deciding the road map or the adding any specific feature to Agora if there are any. Yeah, this is a great question. To be honest, like pretty much all of our features are informed by our customers. And so we have um this way of working that's super super close with most of our customers. And like for example, like the multiple choice vote was a request from the optimism team.

We're like, "Oh, that's actually a really good idea." The fine grain control was a request from a team that we cannot name because they haven't launched yet. But all of this stuff comes from just working with the community who use Agora and we're very selective with the folks that we work with because we really want to work with projects who take governance seriously and then because we do that we hear a lot of really really good feature requests and then we our job is to make sure that we sort through the best ones and prioritize them accordingly. So very cool. It's always a good idea to collect the feedback here if you are getting suggestions that can help make a better product product that is actually useful to the end customer. So, so good to know about that. We have used a term progressive decentralization multiple

time as we understand it's kind of delicate process. I wonder how does Agora help protocols decentralized without losing efficiency or cohesion? Yeah, it's a great question. So, let me first like do a little bit of a quick history lesson on decentralization. So, a lot of the rush to fully decentralized uh governance came from an era during which Gary Gensler was the primary enforcer chief in the United States and a lot of projects were doing governance but their prime objective being defense against Gary Gensler, right? So they would do this and they would like as almost a way

of doing, hey, we did a token. We want to be as decentralized as possible from day one because we really don't want to like tangle with the SEC on this stuff. And well, they got well notices and subpoenas from the SEC anyway because they we just were in a very unreasonable regime. But like it was almost like the prime directive was defense. But I think if you think about it from first principles, it doesn't make any sense, right? Right? It's very hard for projects to go 0 to 100 on decentralization. And so what that means is that in 2025 with a more reasonable regulatory regime in the US, never mind the crime that is being committed by the president himself on some of this weird stuff that he's doing. The SEC is

actually really reasonable now. And so I think if you sort of like read a lot of the upcoming uh legislation on market structures, there is sort of this like very reasonable like allowance for projects to progressively decentralize and there sort of safe harbors for projects to like you know take things at their own pace. There's a rough four-year suggestion so far on sort of like where they have when they have to reach full decentralization. So even at the regulatory level, it's becoming clear that like like um like the SEC is like, "Yeah, you probably should take a little bit of time. This this is reasonable." But before you're fully decentralized, you should do a lot of disclosures, right? Like if you're not decentralized, then you need to tell people what's going on. And once you are

sufficiently decentralized and everybody knows what's going on because everything is transparent. And so I think even at the regulation level, this is sort of where things are headed. And so really what this means like um practically is that like a lot of these projects are going to try to grow up and decentralize the same way that companies grow up and decentralized, right? Like it's like at first the founders are doing everything. They control everything. And then like eventually you have shareholders, you have boards, right? You become a public company. You have like like reporting that you have to do transparency you have to do. You have executives who handle certain things. And it's just like obviously it's going to be different because these things are open source projects and protocols, but they're also going to be quite similar, right? We're going to like delegate

power, delegate control, we're going to have accountability, but and all that stuff is just going to happen over time as projects mature. And so hope my hope is that it's going to look quite boring to most people, right? Like this is governance shouldn't be a riveting space, right? If if your governance is too exciting, it's probably because something is wrong. And so I I just like I think that it's going to get like very practical and uh like we're you're going to see governance less on Twitter because it's just going to be a little less drama. I'm sure Gary Gansler has earned a place in Ethereum's history book. It's good to see things are being handled better even if it is in response to pressure. We are moving towards a more decentralized world and that's good for Ethereum ecosystem.

Moving on to your next keyword delegation. I wonder how does Agura's delegation tooling improve the delegate quality and participation of traditional models and does it really increase the participation in governance process significantly? Yeah, it's a good question. I think there are projects out there that probably are suffering from a lack of participation quite intensely and they they need like that that's sort of a problem that deserves tackling. But I also think that for a lot of new projects, I don't think that participation is necessarily a good end goal, right? It's like the um more voting is does not equal better governance, right? Like better

decision-m is actually better governance. And so to the extent where folks are are asking us oftentimes about, hey, like how do we get people to vote more? And I I usually reply with like like what is the goal for people voting more? Do you want more decentralization or do you want like better decision- making? And then there are ways to achieve both, right? That like very frequently ends up not being people voting more, right? More decentralization sometimes means like less control for the team, but it doesn't necessarily mean more voting for the community, right? The community can vote very little but have a lot of control. And similarly, I think better decision-m sometimes means better incentive alignment. It means sometimes having the right people in the right

places, but it also doesn't necessarily mean more voting. And so I I think the sometimes there's sort of this confusion between better governance is more voting that I think I'm trying to dispel. I think a too little voting is probably incorrect. But you know, I think more voting frequently isn't equal to better governance. And I would argue the delegation to be the same, right? More delegation isn't necessarily always better governance. It can be but it's not always the case. I agree. There has to be a right balance, right mix of everything in order to have a better governance in place. Very well. My next question is with respect to public good. We often talk about public goods in web3 world

from your perspective. What does that really mean when we apply it to something like governance tooling or voting infrastructure? It's a good question. It's not clear to me that these governance tooling and governance infrastructure ought to be public goods. Oh, this is spicy, right? Like I think in Ethereum we often confuse private goods that have not yet found their business model and public goods, right? And so I think there's sort of like this like maybe push in Ethereum that like everything should be a public good. But I think it's sort of like if you like dig into it, I think actually a lot of things are better run as private goods and a lot of things are sort of like and frequently like if you believe in the markets you should believe in that like hey like yes they're not perfect but like it's

generally better for us to have folks running competitive private goods competing to deliver the best product and services against each other. But then there are things that are naturally public goods that are hard to regulate like land like where it's like oh okay right like the classic example is like roads right and so these things are ought to be public goods but we should be judicious in sort of drawing the line and I don't think that governance tooling and governance infrastructure ought to be a public good because they benefit from competition they benefit from like finding a way to monetize because they provide a certain value to its end users. So maybe that's my hot take is that like governance software is

helpful for public goods and can serve to advance the progress of public goods because they use governance software but governance software itself I don't know that they should be public goods. Yeah, it's kind of a blurry line here. We talk about infrastructure gave an example of roads. So that is considered public good. So some people may get confused about these tooling to be considered as public good. If I have to make it a little bit more spicy, would you consider Agora public good or private good? Oh, it's very simple. Agora is a private good right now. I think we have there are large of Agora that are built for the benefit of the public, right? the fact that we're open source, the fact

that like we work in a space that we believe a lot of public good projects benefit from Agora. We also give out Agora for free and offer services for free to projects that we believe are good for Ethereum. But we are fundamentally a private good. We are a equity based company with venture funding and so in that sense we are extremely a private good. So I think we are closer right to a company because well frankly okay let me be very sort of like we are much closer to a YC backed startup than we are to like clean air right or like you know lighouses and I think that there are some projects in Ethereum that are actually closer to like clean air in lighouses but I don't

believe that we are one of them and I don't believe that anybody working in the governance tooling space is one of them is maybe my spicy take that's cool it's an honest response to the so right and to be clear you can do a lot of good for the public as a private good as well right and this is sort of like the line and there is a lot of public goods that have a poor benefit for the public too right so it's like a public good isn't necessarily inherently better for the public although it often is right than a private good so that I think public good is almost like very confusing like a a misnomer yeah it's kind of watery here there's a lot of confusion questions around what should be public good in the first place

when it comes to funding. There are so many projects which are engaged with public good funding and there are so many projects which are participating to that. So yeah. Yeah. And if you really take the like strict economic definition of like public good, it's like non-excludable non-rival risk and like if you apply those definitions to most things that are claiming to be public goods and you're like wait this is totally excludable and totally like can't well rival sometimes software is not as but it's certainly very excludable anyway. So I'm like like you are a private good that haven't found your business model yet. It is up to you to find your business model, right? And that's like that's okay. It's it's not dirty to have a business model. It's good to have a business model and so like we need to like I think this is sort of we need to

really be judicious as a community in Ethereum to identify what are the real public goods and then massively spend those things and in a very highly concentrated and high conviction way. But we shouldn't go spray and prey our funding and support on things that are really private goods with no business model because then we would be subsidizing the wrong things. Right? We really ought to subsize our public goods but in a very concentrated and opinionated way as opposed to this diffused way that is really floating up like perhaps bad private goods. Anyway, very correct. Long-term sustainability of a project is equally important as having a project in the ecosystem. So having a private good and having a funding model is never wrong thing to

have. Moving ahead, you have mentioned about this project that this is an open-source project and I yet see the license is MIT. I'm curious why not go for CC0. I think CC0 is generally more for media as far as I understand. So MIT is basically the equivalent of CC0 for software. I believe that so I I worked in in nouns for a little bit and I believe the CC0 licenses are basically like it's sort of this like copy left license where like everybody's free to use remix and share but I believe that if you mix remix and share you don't have to also be CC0 uh you can change the license and I believe MIT is actually exactly the same I mean maybe if you want to push it's like why aren't

we a copy left license like I think u GNU I think GNU I forget it's like or Apache I forget it's one of I think it's the GNU license. Let me actually try to beat through this live real quick. Yes. And I think GNU is actually anything that is like forked off from this work also has to be GNU, right? So it's kind of this like virus license where anybody who uses my work also has to let anybody use my work. And Agora is not that. Agora is MIT and that like anybody's free to use my work, but when you use my work, you can change the license if you want. So there are you know like debates and philosophical things around GMU versus MIT but I think we're in the MIT camp by default and CC0 in some sense I think quite close to MIT

that is true MIT is very close to CC0 and Ethereum I have seen most of the at least for proposals they are all CC0 and we try to keep the softwares around that so that's brought me to this question like why not go for that because the project is already open source and you are open to the idea that people can f and do whatever they want to do with this code. Yeah, I'm looking at the difference between CC0 and MIT and I think there are some subtleties that maybe I should go study but um yeah, it's a good question. I uh I haven't looked at like I think MIT is already permissive enough that like we've really haven't sort of like spent a lot of time here to like figure out the additional nuances of MIT, CC0 and GNU and it hasn't really come up frankly. Most people are happy

enough that we're MIT. Yeah, I think that's good enough. I was just curious. That's why I shared this question with you. Yeah. Yeah. And frankly, MIT is also the license that we personally are more familiar with because that's the like um it's sort of like the one that we know what we are signing up for and we when we first started this project, we're like ah man like do we want to be GNU? Do we want to be CZ? We're not as familiar with those licenses, but MIT we know what we're signing up for and it feels good enough. All right. My next question is about Agura's role in optimism. Optimism when launched the RPGF round. I believe that was one of the biggest round of funding that was brought into the Ethereum ecosystem. Want to understand how do you see onchain governance supporting these

kind of public good funings? How do you find Agora playing the most important role here? Yeah, that's a great question. So, I think people don't know this, but the Agora team actually built the entire infrastructure for retrofunding which now is called OP Atlas. And so, we collaborate really deeply with the autism team. They provide a lot of the strategic and product direction and we've been sort of providing a lot of the engineering infrastructure for all of that to happen and it's been a really fruitful collaboration for the last like year and a half and I expect that to continue for a long time. Super excited about that stuff.

Very cool. I know we have come close to the end of time. I have one more question for you. Are there any new projects or collaboration with Agora that we should be looking forward to? Many soon. In fact, there's hopefully one that is launching in a couple of weeks that is a a pure public good. So, look forward to that. I I'm sure you guys will never recognize the name. They work in the Ethereum and are are very much about public goods funding. So, I can't unfortunately disclose a lot of the coming stuff because it really is attached often times to token launch that we do not want to dox. But, this one in particular, I think, is going to be close to our hearts for everyone on this call. I'll send you guys a uh a ping or look out for our Twitter once

that comes out. Thank you so much. We are so looking forward to project Agora and the projects which are built on this ecosystem. [Music] I'll just really give you the 30 secondond answer which is that like I think VC token holders are like just a it's just a fact of life now right that like they are going to be large token holders in these projects and for a long time they were very afraid of participating in the governance of projects because of a the UK president where they could be deemed liable for projects if they vote that is going away a little bit so I expect them to be engaged more in the future and I

actually think that VCs are some of the most sophisticated participants in governance because they have the strongest incentive for these projects to go well because they hold so many tokens. And so I actually think that more VCs engaging in governance is probably a good thing and it's not bad at all. And I think the way that they've been engaging currently is sort of this like cloak and dagger behind the scenes stuff because they really don't want to be seen doing it. And I think when we can get to a place where they can just openly advocate for outcomes that are positive for the project because they are incentive aligned to the project success, I think that'll be good. So I look forward to that personally and I expect that the this boogeyman of oh no VC coins control everything is going to go away when people really see sort of

like oh these are like the longest term holders like most of these VCs are going to hold these tokens for 10 years uh from just like their fund duration. And so they're more incentivized for success than frankly most people which is the great irony of this space. Is there any any final comment that you would like to share from this platform? Please feel free any shoutouts or anything specific that you want to share. I think maybe the last like message I'll leave everyone with is that it's a tough market right now for a lot of teams. It's a tough market for the Ethereum Foundation. It's a tough market for a lot of projects in the ecosystem. And I think it's generally been a a tough time. And I think in tough times, I think it's helpful to reach back into sort of like the ethos of the space and

why we're all here. I think sometimes in the day-to-day trenches of operating a company, an organization, a project, you sort of forget that like the ethos of the space and sort of that some of the more I I'd say higher level goals that we're all here to push forward. And so like I see a lot of folks and I talk to a lot of folks who are kind of like you know like feeling a little tired after a long marathon and just want to say I see you keep going. Very cool. Well, thanks Eton for taking our time to talk to us about project Agora. We look forward to upcoming announcements.

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