In May, Colony competed in the Consensus 2016 Proof of Work Pitch Competition. We said going into that competition that if we won the $10k prize, we’d use the money to host our first ever in-person team all hands.

Well, here we are, in Amsterdam. (We were in Amsterdam to present on the future of work at the Dutch Blockchain Conference.)

Embarrassingly enough, this is our best “team” photo even though only 6 out of the 8 are in it.

In Amsterdam the team bonded. We made predictions about the upcoming Brexit vote, played rowdy games of Werewolf, and meandered our way throughout the city. Oh, and we also did some work, like setting our Q3 OKRs.

For this upcoming quarter, our company’s goals focus around two milestones:

Publishing our white paper before the end of Q3 Launching the product before September

We are an internally motivated group, but if that wasn’t enough we now have even more incentive to finish our white paper on time: Colony will be presenting at Devcon2 in September!

If you are in Shanghai in September, make sure to stop by and say hi. We would love to meet you!

Updates on the Colony Protocol

September is when we’ll publish the full protocol in our white paper. But I’m guessing you want a teaser into our progress so far.

The first step was for us to define the structure of Colonies. Specifically, how different people, actions, and data interact to form a Colony. Our work since has focused on our voting mechanisms. We now have a complete and robust voting mechanism! We’ll be publishing an article on this soon. Finalising our reputation model is next.

We will be publishing more articles over the coming weeks explaining these concepts in detail.

We Wrote Some Articles

Speaking of articles, have you seen our latest? We’ve published three recently. (Edit: and a fourth yesterday on the future of work.)

As the Ethereum community continues to discuss the aftermath of TheDAO heist, Jack du Rose, Colony’s CEO, has published two articles on the matter: “An Ethereum hard fork is not a bailout; it’s foiling a bank robbery” and “Why a post hard fork Ethereum will be more valuable”.

If you are an Ethereum developer working with smart contracts, then you should read Elena Dimitrova’s post, “Writing upgradable contracts in Solidity”, where introduce how to implement upgradeable Ethereum contracts.

When can I use Colony?

The white paper is one focus this quarter. The other is getting the beta product live.

Reid Hoffman famously said:

“If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late.”

Yet today, the quality of apps is so high, the bar for the V in MVP is increasingly lofty. That’s why we buy into the concept of the MLP.

We have had a working prototype since the middle of April. Yet — working didn’t equate to usable let alone loveable.

That said, after furiously squishing bugs and improving the experience and performance of the product, we are much closer.

For this first version, we are partnering with digital agencies who are “externally open”. That is, agencies who have a core team of employees but have opened up their work to a network of external contributors.

If you are part of a digital agency that is currently or wanting to be externally open and would like to be one of the first to use Colony, reach out to Collin.