The Colony Network is now live on Rinkeby testnet

It’s been a long time coming, but we’re super excited to announce, the launch of the Colony Network to Ethereum’s Rinkeby testnet, complete with working Reputation!

Check it out here: 0xD4C145EbdC7f072d10a07b8ea4515AF996EE437c

via GIPHY

There are a few provisos — this isn’t a complete launch of Colony. This is a testnet deployment of a subset of the whitepaper functionality for developers building with Colony, not end users (i.e. there is no UI — the easiest way to create a new colony is to set up a local environment for colonyJS).

The Usable Mining Client

In order to fast-track a Rinkeby deployment, we made a few centralized (ಠ_ಠ ) compromises with the reputation system. Specifically, for the Rinkeby test colonyNetwork, there will only be one “trusty” reputation miner.

In the current implementation, the trusty central miner is the only one providing Reputation Root Hashes to the system. The miner promises not to misuse this power, and the reputation states are all still in principle verifiable from on-chain events.

To query a particular reputation state, you can ask our reputation oracle at:

https://colony.io/reputation/rinkeby/{colonyAddress}/{skillId}/{userAddress}

You can now also run the reputation mining client and use it with your local testnet, too! See the colonyNetwork docs for how to get that set up.

Show me the Rinkeby

Here are some things you can do right now:

Create a new colony and import your token.

Add (single level) domains to your colony.

Create a new task, assign workers, submit work ratings, and trigger a task payout.

Here’s (unfortunately) some functionality not implemented yet on Rinkeby (but which you can still do on your own testnet):

Joining the Meta Colony

Create skill tags, other than the global skillId[1]

Thankfully, the colonyNetwork takes smart contract upgrades super seriously, and we’ll expand the functionality of this test deployment soon™.

The best way to get started with the colonyNetwork deployment on Rinkeby is by adding a special loader to your colonyJS app. You can read how to do this in the loaders api.

Using some of the example code in the colonyJS Get Started guide, you’ll be off creating new test colonies in a few minutes.

If you run into any technical snags in your colonyJS setup, or want to invite others to join your shiny new Rinkeby colony, please come post in the Hackathon Gitter chat! We’ll be there to help, and your feedback will help us improve our documentation.

If you have any feedback or stories to share, reach out to us on Twitter.

Colony is a platform for open organizations.

Join the discussion on Discourse, follow us on Twitter, sign up for (occasional) email updates, or if you’re feeling old-skool, drop us an email.