Colony v2 will soft launch on Ethereum mainnet and xDai chain at 17:00 UTC (ish) on 15th February 2021.
Join us for the ride on Telegram or Discord!
What is Colony?
Colony is the most powerful, practical, flexible, and easy to use DAO framework, and we're extremely excited to let people start playing with our sparkly new dapp.
This video shows where Colony is heading in the months following launch:
What does soft launch mean?
It means we’re ready to play… gently.
It’s an early beta, so there will be bugs, and assorted UX quirks. We’ll appreciate you helping us find them.
And while the Colony Network v5 smart contracts on which the app runs contain virtually all features detailed in the Colony whitepaper, the app doesn’t yet. So, using it means accepting its current limitations. (See below)
We also make no guarantees about Colony’s security or fitness for purpose; the Colony Network smart contracts are large, complex, and under active development, which makes audit impractical. While Colony has been developed with a defensive programming mentality, it would be imprudent to deposit your project’s entire treasury to your colony right away. We’re looking into some ways to attenuate this concern, but for now, exercise caution: you use Colony at your own risk.
Alright, so here’s what to expect, and what not to expect.
Launch features
Colonies
Create, join, and switch between colonies; just like Slack.
Tokens
Issue a new erc20 token, or bring your own; the choice is yours.
Receive funds
Receive and manage income in any erc20 compatible token.
Action Creator
All the actions your colony can take, accessible via one button.
Simple Payments
Send funds from a colony to an external account.
Teams
Structure your colony into teams to divide and conquer any project.
Budgets
Allocate teams their own budgets to control.
Permissions
Assign authority to members in each team to create expenditures, transfer funds, and more.
Reputation
Payment in a colony’s native token confers reputation in the team from which it was received. Reputation decays over time.
Events
A log of everything that happens in your colony, whether in the app, or directly via the contracts.
Recovery mode
Your colony’s panic button in case of emergency. Freeze the colony. Fix the problem. Restart your colony via multisig.
Coming Soon
After launch, updates will roll out thick and fast. Over the first month, aside from a bunch of minor improvements and bug fixes, you can expect to see:
Extension manager
Install and manage smart contract extensions that expand your colony’s capabilities.
Token Supplier (extension)
Control the supply of your colony’s token. We’re really imaginative with names.
Coin Machine (extension)
Sell tokens in fixed price batches, adjusting prices up or down between batches based on recent demand.
Early Access Program
While decentralised governance is Colony’s raison d’être, it is not available at launch.
If you wish to participate in the early access program, we don’t want you to be disappointed when you find you can’t do voting. It’s coming, real soon, but early users must be prepared to work around this limitation for a little while.
If you understand the limitation, and still want in, reach out here and tell us about your use case.
[Edit] We've taken the decision not to deploy Colony to Ethereum. It was going to cost about $15,000 to do, and we thought it irrational to burn the gas when using Colony on mainnet is currently prohibitively expensive.
If you already have a colony on Ethereum, you’ll need to upgrade your Colony Network version to v5 to use it want to withdraw any funds that are currently on there and create a new Colony on xDai chain. That said, to avoid any nasty surprises, we urge you to be mindful of gas costs before signing transactions on mainnet.
Fin
That’s it for now. In a post dropping in the next few days, we’ll outline what the dapp roadmap for the next six or so months looks like (and yes, it’ll include governance).
Colony makes it easy for people all over the world to build organisations together, online.
Join the conversation on Discord, follow us on Twitter, sign up for (occasional and awesome) email updates, or if you’re feeling old-skool, drop us an email.
