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 receiving payments, completing tasks, and evaluating others’ 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.

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 — a reputation half-life of roughly 3.5 months. 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, 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, 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.

How Caper approaches this

Colony and 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. Each time a member votes, the contract mints them exactly one soulbound vote token — non-transferable by construction (its depositor role is the dao itself, so it can never move peer-to-peer) and indivisible (DIVISIBILITY_NONE). A member’s weight is w = (t · v) / (V · T), where t is the caper tokens they hold, v the vote tokens they have earned, V the total votes ever cast, and T the circulating supply.

Two consequences follow, both verifiable in contracts/src/caper_dao.rs. First, participation is a multiplier on stake, not a replacement for it: a large bag with no voting history still resolves to little weight, but the earned record is the factor a newcomer cannot simply buy. Second, the very same formula sets a member’s payout when they exit — the exit() path reuses the identical compute_vote_weight helper for the treasury share — so the earned signal that governs your voice also governs the value you can walk away with. Unlike Colony’s reputation, a caper’s vote record does not decay: it is a permanent, on-chain history of having shown up.

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.