For the Integrity of the Vote

We're excited to announce our partnership with Mirador, as well as notes about other investments, all demonstrating our commitment to the integrity of the vote.

Mirador - A Novel Observability Partner

Agora is partnering with a new web3 native observability platform, Mirador. Traditional observability tools are great at telling you that a request was slow or a server returned a 500. They are not great at telling you that a specific wallet was failing to use a specific EIP.

Without this visibility, all we used to get from a user is "My transaction didn't go through". "Why?" they would ask. And we would be caught, without much to go on to fix the root cause. It's impossible to test with every wallet, every browser, and every OS.

Mirador is a two-part solution: frontend and backend SDKs that instrument the actual user journey, and a dashboard that makes those traces usable when something goes wrong.

We integrated both sides across the paths where governance most often gets complicated: proposal creation, voting, delegation, proposal queueing and execution.

The important part is trace continuity, including after the action leaves our app. A single action can now carry the same Mirador trace from the browser into our API routes and server actions, then hand Mirador the onchain anchors it needs to keep following the workflow through wallet signing, Safe confirmations, relayers, attestations, transaction submission and execution.

Potential errors are no longer a mystery spread across frontend logs, backend logs, Safe, and block explorers. This way, we can quickly see where the action stopped, what state it reached, and what needs to be fixed.

We've already rolled this out across our deployments. The goal is simple: if vote integrity is ever in question, we should know before our users do, with enough trace context to find the cause in minutes rather than days.

It’s working exactly as intended. We’ve caught several issues already, that would have been extremely obscure to catch without the help of Mirador.

A Dedicated Testing Wallet

A little over a year ago, we realized a massive limitation with testing.

It was very hard to test front end heavy flows, with impersonation tooling, because wallets were not really built for

We rolled Fawkes Wallet, a wallet dedicated to automation and testing.

It's like Metamask, except controlled by API endpoints, rather than human clicks.

It signs messages and transactions -- so it can cast votes, queues and executes proposals. It doesn't simulate behavior in a sandbox. It does the real thing, against the real contracts, against any RPC it's given with any key it's given. Plus, it has impersonation aware functionality, supported if the RPC is provided by Anvil.

That gives us a continuous, end-to-end probe of governance health that catches things unit tests and staging environments cannot. The wallet is segregated, keys are all stored in ram only. It exists to find problems on our side before they ever cost a real participant a vote.

Custom Infrastructure for Vote Testing

Around the wallet, we're building custom infrastructure designed specifically to test governance flows the way they actually run.

The stack allows for end-to-end testing that rides on an anvil fork, a clone of production indexing and cache, and browser based automation.

We’ve also built an A/B test rig, that allows for the comparison of two deployments, to confirm only expected changes flow through to the final production site.

This infrastructure is governance-specific by design. Generic load tools don't know what a quorum is. Generic uptime checks don't know that a delegation took effect at the wrong block. We're building the tooling that does.

Rolling Out

The observability partnership, testing wallet, and custom infrastructure are rolling out across Agora deployments now. Most of this work will be invisible to users, and that's the point. The work you don't see is what makes the vote you cast count.

If you're building in this space and care about the same problem, we'd love to compare notes. Vote integrity is not a competitive advantage — it's table stakes for the entire category. Let's get it right together.