Colony is a flexible and easy-to-use framework for creating and running DAOs. It provides everything an organization needs to operate on-chain: Payments, Teams, Authority, Governance, Fundraising, Revenue sharing, Arbitration, and the ability to interact with any other smart contract on Ethereum.
When you create a DAO, you’ll need to manage many operational aspects. Users can either find a tool to handle each different aspect (one tool to track contributions, one tool to manage compensation, etc. ) or use an all-in-one solution like Colony.
Anyone who wants to set up a DAO can use the primitives that are pre-built within Colony:
There are so many tools out there that exist to make DAO creation & management smooth and efficient that it can be overwhelming. Instead of combining dozens of individual tools, which also makes the onboarding of new contributors more complex, Colony empowers users with one end-to-end solution.
A very cool aspect of Colony is that it’s open-source and modular, enabling users to plug-in extensions to run their organization in a customized way. Developers are, therefore, a key part of Colony’s strategy, which encourages developers to build on top of their platform.
Colony published the first version of their Whitepaper back in 2017, but the product “didn’t meet expectations due to an unpleasant user experience,” according to Colony’s founder. The DAO tooling landscape has dramatically changed over the past four years, with dozens of established tools used by large DAOs. Will Colony actually be able to replace all of them with their all-in-one tool? Will DAOs actually want more customizability, creating their own stack instead of a more prescriptive end-to-end solution?
As with most d’Apps, gas fees are pretty prohibitive on Colony. They’ve decided to disable Colony creation on Ethereum to prevent new users from incurring unexpectedly high costs, and now run on Ethereum sidechain xDai.
Colony has a robust roadmap of future functionality:
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Watch this tutorial on how to build a DAO on Colony