---
title: "Colony"
url: "https://caper.network/wiki/dao-governance/tooling/frameworks/colony"
updated: 2026-08-31
license: CC-BY-4.0
license_url: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/"
---

# Colony

|  |  |
| --- | --- |
| **Category** | DAO framework (reputation-weighted, task-based governance) |
| **What it is** | A framework for running organisations on _reputation_ earned by contribution, with governance by _lazy consensus_ — vote only when someone objects |
| **Builder** | [JoinColony](https://github.com/JoinColony) (Colony Network; whitepaper by Alex Rea & Jack du Rose) |
| **Native token** | [CLNY](https://docs.colony.io/learn/payments-and-tokens/the-metacolony-clny/) — the token of the Metacolony that maintains the network (distinct from any colony’s own token, and from reputation) |
| **Chains** | Historically [Gnosis Chain](https://blog.colony.io/chain-migration/); from April 2024 [multi-chain, starting with Arbitrum](https://blog.colony.io/colony-is-going-multi-chain/) |
| **Related** | [DAO tooling overview](/wiki/dao-governance/tooling/dao-tooling-overview), [Aragon](/wiki/dao-governance/tooling/frameworks/aragon), [Governance models](/wiki/dao-governance/concepts/fundamentals/dao-governance-models) |

**Colony** is a DAO framework built on a single idea most governance tools skip: influence should be _earned_, not bought. Where [Snapshot](/wiki/dao-governance/tooling/voting/snapshot) and [token voting](/wiki/dao-governance/concepts/voting/voting-and-delegation) 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](https://github.com/JoinColony) from a [2018 whitepaper](https://joincolony.github.io/colonynetwork/whitepaper-tldr-colony/), and it sits in the [frameworks layer](/wiki/dao-governance/tooling/dao-tooling-overview) of the DAO stack alongside [Aragon OSx](/wiki/dao-governance/tooling/frameworks/aragon) and Moloch.

## Reputation: earned, scoped, and decaying

Reputation is the heart of Colony. A member gains it by [receiving payments, completing tasks, and evaluating others’ work](https://docs.colony.io/learn/governance/reputation/) 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.

Its defining property is that it **decays**. Per Colony’s [reputation specification](https://joincolony.github.io/colonynetwork/whitepaper-tldr-reputation/), 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”](https://docs.colony.io/learn/governance/reputation/), 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.

## Lazy consensus: motions and disputes

Colony’s governance model, [lazy consensus](https://docs.colony.io/learn/governance/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** — nested teams that each hold their own budget and accrue their own reputation, so a large organisation can delegate spending authority downward without granting global control. Payments, funding pots and permissions all resolve against this domain tree.

The network itself is governed by the **[Metacolony](https://docs.colony.io/learn/payments-and-tokens/the-metacolony-clny/)**, 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](https://blog.colony.io/chain-migration/), Colony [began a multi-chain rollout on Arbitrum in April 2024](https://blog.colony.io/colony-is-going-multi-chain/).

## How Caper approaches this

Colony and [Caper](/wiki/foundations/what-is-a-caper) start from the same conviction — that a wallet balance alone should not decide who controls an organisation — and reach it by different routes. In Colony, earned influence lives in a _separate_ quantity (reputation) that decays to track current engagement. In a caper, the earned signal is folded directly into the vote-weight formula. A member’s weight is `w = (t · v) / (V · T)`, where `t` is the caper tokens they hold, `v` their own vote-token balance, `V` the vote-token supply across all members, and `T` the circulating token supply (`compute_vote_weight`, `contracts/common/src/lib.rs`).

`v` is **soulbound** in the transfer sense — its depositor role is the caper’s own state component and the updater is `deny_all`, so it can never move peer-to-peer — and fractional (`DIVISIBILITY_MAXIMUM`, `contracts/core/src/caper_dao.rs`, because a per-XRD accrual rate cannot mint whole units). It accrues at one flat rate on three surfaces: 0.01 per XRD of gross value on a buy, the same on a sell, and exactly 1 per ranked ballot, the 100 XRD vote fee charged at that identical rate. That is the sharpest difference from Colony’s reputation, and it cuts against the easy story: a newcomer _can_ buy `v`, at a published price, by putting XRD through the curve. What they cannot do is have it handed to them, borrowed to them, or bought off an existing member.

Two consequences follow, both verifiable in `compute_vote_weight` and the `exit` that reuses it in `contracts/logic/src/lib.rs`. First, participation is a _multiplier_ on stake, not a replacement for it: a large bag with no history still resolves to little weight, and buying the history costs real XRD at the same rate everyone else paid. Second, the very same formula sets a member’s payout when they [exit](/wiki/dao-governance/concepts/membership/rage-quit-and-exit-rights) — the `exit()` path reuses the identical helper for the treasury share — so the signal that governs your voice also governs the value you can walk away with. Unlike Colony’s reputation, a caper’s record does not decay: it is a permanent, on-chain history of capital put at risk.

## References

- Colony, [Reputation](https://docs.colony.io/learn/governance/reputation/) and [reputation specification (whitepaper TL;DR)](https://joincolony.github.io/colonynetwork/whitepaper-tldr-reputation/).
- Colony, [Lazy Consensus](https://docs.colony.io/learn/governance/lazy-consensus/).
- Colony, [The Metacolony and CLNY](https://docs.colony.io/learn/payments-and-tokens/the-metacolony-clny/).
- Colony blog, [chain migration](https://blog.colony.io/chain-migration/) and [going multi-chain (Arbitrum, April 2024)](https://blog.colony.io/colony-is-going-multi-chain/).
- JoinColony, [GitHub / Colony Network](https://github.com/JoinColony).