Mainnet release in… negative two weeks™

glider is ready for the prime-time. Mainnet time. Tell your friends.

Actually, things have been live and running smoothly for about two weeks now -- now that we’ve confirmed everything is running as expected, it’s time to SHOW YOU WHAT WE GOT

Artist Credit: SergioDoe

The first release of Colony is glider , and it can be accessed at:

0x5346D0f80e2816FaD329F2c140c870ffc3c3E2Ef

Release notes: https://github.com/JoinColony/colonyNetwork/releases/tag/glider

Devs should read the docs before trying anything ambitious.

New chain, who dis?

Ahoy hoy! This is Colony. In a nutshell?

Organizations, for the Internet.

The Colony Network is an open source Ethereum based protocol providing a general purpose framework to create, operate, and monetize Digital Companies.



Digital Companies are to traditional organizations as digital currencies are to fiat currencies: Digital Currencies are internet-native cash, Digital Companies are internet-native organizations. The Colony Network provides a framework for the essential functions Digital Companies require, such as ownership, structure, authority, and human and financial resource management.

What we're talking about here would fly well with the blockchain-cognoscenti as crypto-organizational primitives: ReputationⓇ, Domains, Permissions, and Incentives are codified structures to coordinate working relationships between people (and/or robots), inside the natively permissionless, psyeudonymous world of smart contracts and blockchains.

These could be the kind of relationships meant to solve the world’s big, ugly multi-party coordination dilemmas (#molochproblems), or they could be relationships forged by the simple need to fairly divvy up DAI amongst a fellowship of friends on an extended adventure. Maybe those end up being two sides of the same token. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

In creating a colony, founders choose how to organize these structures according to whatever work the colony is doing. From platform cooperative to (virtual) thieves guild, a colony provides tools to coordinate work, manage budgets, and make decisions; from each according to her ability, to each according to her reputation-weighted token holdings.

Colony, by virtue of its upgrade pattern, is eternally backwards-compatible, meaning that any organization built with Colony will run indefinitely and unstoppably according to the will of its members. Not a platform, but infrastructure. For the future of the firm.



glider ... Wut?



The first release of Colony is called glider after the smallest of the spaceships from Conway's Game of Life– (spaceships are little explorers of a Universal Turing Machine, not unlike colonies in the EVM).

glider implements the following features of the Colony Protocol as described in the whitepaper, and it will be continuously upgraded to implement new functionality:

ReputationⓇ– with ✨ exponential decay ✨ and a decentralized mining client.

Bring your own token– allowing any colony to use an ERC20 token as a means of accounting for reputation.

Domains– for the management of multiple token *funding pots*, with specialized reputation score according to domain and skill.

Modular Permissions– create granular control over ability to interact with a colony at the domain level.

Payments and Tasks– perform the secure transfer of funds (and reputation) as compensation for work done for the colony.

Rewards– distribute periodically a set amount of a colony’s revenue its contributors, proportional to their reputation-weighted contributions to the colony.

If you feel unsatisfied by this feature list and want a more full-bodied explanation, check out the Görli glider release post or the docs. Those inclined to do so should follow the whitepaper rabbit 🐇.

Importantly, there are aspects of glider that, in their current implementation, require some amount of "trust" in the sense that they are not yet under fully decentralized/distributed control.

The Metacolony is permissioned and controlled by the core contributors to the colonyNetwork repo, as are contract upgrades, maintenance, and reputation mining.

Domains are restricted to single-level within the root domain (nested domains are currently prohibited as a precaution).

Tasks are partially in a "trusty" state, insofar as there is no dispute resolution system implemented at this time to handle work disputes on chain. Payments can be seen as "trustful" Tasks without work ratings or reputation bonuses.

Bug Bounty scope

With the release of glider-rc.1 on the Goerli testnet, the bug bounty program changed in scope a little bit, and it will continue to run permanently. Bugs that affect the mainnet deployment should be reported (discreetly🙏) to security@colony.io -- they will be handsomely rewarded.

If a bug is found that affects only the develop branch, it can be reported as a Github issue, and discussed privately or publicly (if the finder believes it doesn’t constitute a security risk for mainnet).

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Colony builds tools for organizing and incentivizing teams, communities, and contributors.

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