Colony

Colony is a DAO framework built on a single idea most governance tools skip: influence should be earned, not bought. Where Snapshot and token voting weight a member by the coins in their wallet, a colony weights members by reputation – a non-transferable, decaying score accrued by doing the work. Around that it wraps lazy consensus, a workflow designed so that a healthy organisation almost never has to vote at all. It is one of the longest-running frameworks in the space, developed by JoinColony from a 2018 whitepaper, and it sits in the frameworks layer of the DAO stack alongside Aragon OSx and Moloch.

Reputation: earned, scoped, and decaying

Reputation is the heart of Colony. A member gains it by being paid in the colony’s own token for work inside the colony – never by buying it, because reputation is non-transferable. It is also scoped: reputation is tagged to the domain (team) and skill in which it was earned, so an expert in one area does not automatically wield authority over another.

Two details separate the deployed network from the 2018 whitepaper this page otherwise describes. The task and work-rating contracts are gone: what the colony contract set holds is expenditures, funding, rewards, domains and roles, with nothing for tasks or for rating another member’s work. And the payment route is narrower than it sounds, because the documentation states that payments in stablecoins earn no reputation at all (Colony) – a contributor paid in USDC accrues no say, however much they do.

Its defining property is that it decays. Per Colony’s reputation specification, every 600,000 blocks a member’s reputation in each domain and skill is halved, and the spec glosses that as a reputation half-life of “about 3.5 months”. The parameter is the durable half of that sentence and the duration is not: decay runs “on a per-block basis”, so 3.5 months holds only at the roughly fifteen-second Ethereum blocks of the 2018 whitepaper.

Ethereum mainnet averaged 12.05 seconds a block over the ten thousand blocks ending at 25,820,470, read from a public RPC on 23 August 2026, which puts the same 600,000 blocks at about 84 days – and on a five-second chain at nearer 35. Both Colony’s specification and its current documentation still carry the original figure. Influence therefore tracks recent contribution: stop showing up and your say fades, no matter how much you once did. Because computing every member’s reputation on-chain would be prohibitive, it is calculated off-chain by reputation miners who stake CLNY and submit updates with cryptographic proofs, secured by an “innocent until proven guilty” challenge game in which a single honest submission is enough.

That mining is the part to check before relying on any of it. Reputation is recomputed off-chain and written back as a root hash each cycle, so every member’s current score depends on the cycle running. The Colony Network contract on Arbitrum One has emitted no event of any kind since 13 May 2026 at 16:39 UTC – no mining cycle, no new colony, nothing – read on 19 September 2026 against a chain then some 44 million blocks further on. Decay, meanwhile, is a function of block height and does not need a miner. The two together mean that every score in every colony has been decaying for four months with nothing recording the work that would replenish it.

Lazy consensus: motions and disputes

Colony’s governance model, lazy consensus, treats agreement as the default. A member proposes an action – say, “pay Alice 100 xDAI” – and backs it by staking the colony’s native token. If nobody objects within the staking window, the action simply executes: no vote, no quorum, no turnout problem. A vote happens only when someone disagrees and stakes tokens to raise an objection, which escalates the decision to a reputation-weighted vote.

The staking makes objections costly and honest: the side that loses forfeits a portion of its stake to the side that wins, and members who vote can be rewarded from the staked pool. This inverts the usual DAO problem – instead of demanding that a busy, apathetic electorate turn out for every routine payment, Colony only pulls the electorate in when there is genuine conflict worth their attention.

Domains, the Metacolony, and CLNY

A colony is organised into domains, which the documentation now calls teams: each holds its own budget and accrues its own reputation, so an organisation can delegate spending authority without granting global control. The nesting is not built. Colony’s own documentation states that it allows only one layer of teams and that nested teams are forthcoming, so the tree described below is one level deep in practice. Payments, funding pots and permissions all resolve against this domain tree.

The network itself is governed by the Metacolony, the colony responsible for developing and maintaining Colony Network infrastructure; its token, CLNY, is what reputation miners stake and what the Metacolony uses for its own disputes. This is a deliberate three-way separation worth noting: a colony’s token (optional, for staking motions), reputation (earned influence, non-transferable), and CLNY (network-level) are three different things – Colony never conflates “how many tokens you hold” with “how much say you have.” After years of running exclusively on Gnosis Chain, Colony began a multi-chain rollout on Arbitrum in April 2024.

Where the network stands

The migration off Gnosis Chain is the event that dates everything else. Colony announced on 10 December 2024 that after 31 December the Gnosis UI and reputation mining would be discontinued, moved CLNY liquidity to Arbitrum, and said the multi-chain vision would arrive in Q1 2025 (Colony). Eighteen months past that quarter, colony.io still lists chain support as coming soon, and the sign-up button on its own home page reads Early access closed.

The chain gives the size of what moved. Counting every colony-creation event emitted by each network contract, read on 19 September 2026: Gnosis Chain carries 3,713 colonies created between 8 September 2020 and 14 January 2025, and Arbitrum One carries 150, created between 9 April 2024 and 13 May 2026 – 84 in 2024, 61 in 2025 and 5 in 2026. The new deployment recovered about four per cent of the colony count of the old one, and cannot grow while sign-ups are shut.

The product also moved away from the framework this page describes. colony.io now sells itself as a payment suite for teams – batch payments, streaming salaries, staged payments, an off-ramp – and every entry in its changelog falls between June and December 2024. The blog stops on 12 February 2025. What is still true is the design: lazy consensus, staked motions and reputation-weighted escalation are in the contracts and documented down to their default parameters, which the docs note cannot be changed once the extension is enabled (Colony).

How Caper approaches this

Colony and Caper both refuse to let a wallet balance alone decide who controls an organisation. Colony keeps earned influence in a separate quantity, reputation, which decays so that it tracks recent work. A caper folds the earned part into vote weight itself: a member's weight comes from the caper tokens they hold together with vote tokens they earn by voting, so a big bag alone can't capture control.

Vote tokens cannot be bought, and no member can send them to another; Caper mints them for one thing, a ballot cast on a proposal. Unlike Colony's reputation, they do not decay, so they stay as a lasting on-chain record of the votes a member has cast. The same weight governs a member's way out: anyone who has voted can exit any time for their fair share of the treasury, so the record that sets a member's say also sets what they can take with them. See leaving a caper.

References

• Colony, Reputation and reputation specification (whitepaper TL;DR).
• Colony, Lazy Consensus.
• Colony, The Metacolony and CLNY.
• Colony blog, chain migration and going multi-chain (Arbitrum, April 2024).
• JoinColony, GitHub / Colony Network.
• Colony, Teams and governance parameters; colony.io and its changelog.
• Colony creation events and network activity read directly from Arbitrum One and Gnosis Chain on 19 September 2026.