Blockchain governance suite Boardroom has announced a $2.2 million funding round led by Standard Crypto, with additional participation from Variant, CoinFund, Framework and Slow Ventures.
"We are seeing an accelerating volume of protocols interested in public governance enter the market each month," Jake Brukhman of CoinFund said in a press release.
Boardroom provides a simple interface for token holders to participate in votes on different blockchains or dapps whose tokens the user holds.
"It's clear to us that engaged and informed community governance is a distinguishing characteristic of successful crypto-networks – but from a user point-of-view the experience is quite painful!" Alok Vasudev, a co-founder of Standard Crypto, told CoinDesk in an email. "Boardroom makes it easy for users to participate in protocol governance – from voting, to delegating, to staying informed – by providing a common interface across multiple protocols."
With delegating built in, Boardroom should accelerate the era of so-called protocol politicians, those who follow the nuances of each blockchain's governance more closely than small holders often have time for.
"We believe crypto networks will uproot traditional management and ownership structures. They have already demonstrated a powerful new economic model for building software applications, wherein users build and operate products and services they use every day," Kevin Nielsen, the founder, wrote in an announcement of the investment shared with CoinDesk in advance.
Boardroom is designed to be a solution for blockchain participation that can scale with the growth of crypto communities.
"Community-governed communities, coordinated via a token, are not only the future of DeFi, they may be the future of all software," said Priyanka Desai, one of the co-leads of Boardroom investor The LAO. "Boardroom sits in the middle of this emerging ecosystem, lowering the cost of governance and helping to foster a new era of protocol politicians."