Educational task of Satoshi Club drives us to acquaint you with all new projects. We were delighted to welcome our guest from Colony. The AMA took place on March 25th, 2021 and our guest was @jackdurose.
The total reward pool was 500$ and was divided into three parts. In this AMA Recap we will try to summarize some of the most interesting points for you.
Part 1 — introduction and questions from the Telegram&Bitcointalk community
D. Папа Роуч: good day Satoshi Club! 👋 we are starting AMA with Colony!
Маry Satoshi CLUB: Hello Satoshi Club! We are happy to announce our AMA session with Colony! Welcome to Satoshi Club😀 @jackdurose welcome here 😀
D. Папа Роуч: @jackdurose hello! good to have you here!
Jack du Rose: It’s a pleasure to be here @madamlobster 😄
Маry Satoshi CLUB: Happy to see you here! How’s going?
Jack du Rose: All good excited to answer some questions! 😄
D. Папа Роуч: awesome! so let’s begin with intro then 😉
Маry Satoshi CLUB: And we have them! But first introduce yourself and tell us more about Colony😀
Jack du Rose: I’m Jack, the founder of Colony. I started the project actually even before Ethereum, and we presented our first demo of our first prototype at Ethereum Devcon 1. I think that was 2015. And before The DAO! So we’ve been working on the difficult challenge that is effective decentralised governance for a long time. And we think we’re the biggest and best out there. So that’s what Colony is all about. The ultimate DAO framework.
Маry Satoshi CLUB: Wow, so long time to develop! It should be perfect 😉
Jack du Rose: Indeed, we don’t expect it to be perfect, but we do expect it to be the best there is.
D. Папа Роуч: so all this time you have been working on Colony, since 2015?
Jack du Rose: That’s right. Colony is probably the largest solidity codebase of any dapp. It’s an absolute monster. And it’s also completely decentralised. We don’t think it’s acceptable for any organisation that would base their operations on our software, to be at risk of our ceasing to exist and the server they need to use dissapearing. So we’ve built Colony to be 100% decentralised. That means users can have confidence that Colony will always be there for them.
Маry Satoshi CLUB: With Colony this will never happen?
Jack du Rose: Exactly. So let me give you a bit more detail on what makes Colony so good.
D. Папа Роуч: yes, please!
Jack du Rose: If you’ve ever participated in a DAO, you probably think DAOs=Voting
D. Папа Роуч: yep
Маry Satoshi CLUB: Yes
Jack du Rose: And we think that’s precisely incorrect. Tell me, in any “real” organisation you’ve ever worked in, how much voting was there? Very little or none.
Маry Satoshi CLUB: No one
Jack du Rose: Instead people demonstrate their competence, and they earn authority to take actions up to the limit of the authority they’ve been given. if they absue that authority, then it gets removed. The whole point of organizations, and more specificaly companies, which is what most DAOs really are, is to reduce the transactions costs of the market mechanism for supply
D. Папа Роуч: agreed
Jack du Rose: if you’re always having to find suppliers, spec our what you want, negotiate contracts, manage deliver and compensation. it only works up to a certain point. at that point it becomes more expensive to coordinate supply via the market than just to have employees who are available all the time, and have agreed rates, and a detailed understanding of whats required. We call that “a company” Yet DAOs as we know them now dont do this. IIn principle, they HAVE to coordinate supply via the market
Маry Satoshi CLUB: It’s very complex, but definitely has sense
Jack du Rose: and yet they actually increase the transaction/coordination costs because they require everything to be voted on all the time. Colony doesn’t do that
Маry Satoshi CLUB: So, what Colony does?
Jack du Rose: instead, people can make proposals and as long as nobody objects, after a security delay, it will pass. If someone really does disagree, they can “Object” by staking against the proposal and only then will a vote take place an critically, both the ability to create and object to proposals, and to vote is weighted by Reputation in the organisation, not (usualy) based on tokens. so that means the people who have demonstrated they actually understand the thing being decided on have the ability to make things happen and because of that, decisions can happen efficiently, with a minimum of unneccesary voting. There’s a lot more to Colony than that though, but perhaps there are other directions you’d like to explore
Маry Satoshi CLUB: Very interesting 👍 Sure, i see that you have a lot of directions! And we have a some questions about this😀 From our community
Jack du Rose: hit me
Маry Satoshi CLUB: Let’s start part 1🚀 and thank you for your intro 👍
D. Папа Роуч: thank you for the great intro! let’s open the first part!
Q1 from Telegram user @h1drX
All of us who work with cryptocurrencies are aware of the high fees that Ethereum is demanding on its blockchain, causing people to stop using ETH. Why did you decide to create Colony on the Ethereum blockchain? In what aspects of the project does the high rates affect? Are you planning to adopt another blockchain soon?
Jack du Rose: We aren’t on Ethereum, we’re on xDai. Using Colony is not feasible on Mainnet. However, the EVM is the place to be for now. So we’re working to enable L2 governance (e.g. sidechains and rollups) with L1 execution.
Маry Satoshi CLUB: When do you plan Mainnet?
Jack du Rose: So if you’re a DeFi protocol on L1, you can do your governance on fast, cheap L2, and still see smart contract execution manifest on L1. We don’t plan to release on Ethereum mainnet until Ethereum scales. It’s not necessary for us to deploy there. In terms of other L1 chains, in my opinion there are really only a handful that are likely to be meaningful in the future. We get approached by a lot of them asking us to build on their platforms. but the most important thing to us is the ecosystem that exists on a chain and none of them are able to demonstrate anything meaningful there (other than Polkadot, Dfinity, Cosmos)
Маry Satoshi CLUB: Wait, do you mean L1 and L2 on ETH or xDai also has L1 and L2?
Jack du Rose: No, xDai is an L2 sidechain of Ethereum. Runs on a Delegated Proof of Stake chain
Маry Satoshi CLUB: Got it!
Jack du Rose: gas is always 1gwei and denominated in Dai. so transactions are suuuuuper cheap. for example to deploy a colony on Ethereum mainnet flucations in cost between areound $1500-$2500
D. Папа Роуч: wow, thank you for clarification! something new to me, i have never used xDai
Jack du Rose: to deploy on xDai always costs $0.0055. Half a cent!
Маry Satoshi CLUB: Really? I forget about such prices 😂
Jack du Rose: So on xDai $0.01 in gas money goes a really long way. About 30-50 tx depending on how big they are
Маry Satoshi CLUB: I payed 20$ for approval today😂 And it was L2 solution😂
D. Папа Роуч: yeah, tell me 😄😉
Jack du Rose: Wow, that’s a lot. What’s up next 😄
D. Папа Роуч: it was dydx alpha version. so ready for the next question? 😉.
Jack du Rose: hell yeah. hit me
Q2 from Telegram user @RosemaryBianco
Colony released their new version recently (Colony v2), but they mentioned that it will be a “soft release”, which shows that it is an early beta version, so there will be bugs and a variety of UX quirks. So, as of today, you have already managed to solve several issues within this version ? was this release a success ? Do you plan to release a new version without existing bugs and quirks?
Jack du Rose: Ha! Well there will I think be bugs and quirks for a while as we’re aggressively shipping features rather than focussing on maintenance. we tend to prioritise moving forwards over tidying up and mainly fix the important bugs
Маry Satoshi CLUB: Very good strategy
Jack du Rose: thankfully there haven’t been too many of those, and what there were we fixed easily. But we’re now constaly shipping. We release a new deployment roughly weekly. Sometimes it’s new features, sometimes it’s squishing bugs. We just don’t announce it every time becuase frankly its boring. 😄
Маry Satoshi CLUB: Do you have any roadmap? When do you plan to leave word ‘soft’ behind?
Jack du Rose: Sure do, and it’s 🔥 https://blog.colony.io/roadmap
Маry Satoshi CLUB: So many events this year! You choose right time!
Jack du Rose: I think we’ll consider it a hard(?!) release, when we roll pur our governance functionality in Q2.
D. Папа Роуч: thanks! that’s the most informative roadmap i’ve ever seen 😁
Маry Satoshi CLUB: It’s near🔥
D. Папа Роуч: nice!
Jack du Rose: Yeah, we’re now in a place where we’ve really done most of the difficult stuff that’s invisible to end users but necessary to make the magic happen. Now we’re mainly focussed on shipping UI to end users, and we’re doing that in such a way that the longer we’re building the faster it will be for us to ship stuff.
D. Папа Роуч: awesome! thank you for the answers! ready for the next question from the community?
Jack du Rose: Bring.It.On
Q3 from Telegram user @mctrho
If I’m not mistaken, Colony has “update capability”, which will allow people to use Colony without preventing themselves from using new features as they are added to the network. This implementation works based on the “EtherRouter contract” and the “Resolver contract”. Can you explain to us how these contracts can work together?
Jack du Rose: Okay a deep technical question. Let me pass this to my colleague and I’ll give you his response shortly. Next question please!
D. Папа Роуч: got it!
Маry Satoshi CLUB: Ok, we can go to the next and then, when you will get response will go back to this
Q4 from Telegram User @yellowchamp
Can you explain more about the Metacolony? How can anyone become part of Metacolony? How does Metacolony connected with Colony? How does Metacolony become essential and important to Colony ecosystem? What positive and negative impact that Metacolony will bring to Colony network? Thank you
Jack du Rose: The Metacolony is the colony that manages the colony network. Eventually, we as a company will cease to exist, and all governance rights will be ceded to the Metacolony. We have outlined this process in detail in our technical whitepaper at https://colony.io/whitepaper.pdf
Маry Satoshi CLUB: So, Colony won’t exist in the future?
Jack du Rose: Anyone will be able to join by doing something useful for the metacolony, like writing some code, or helping with promotion. Colony will exist, but Colony is the platform, no the company. And it will be governed by the Metacolony.
Маry Satoshi CLUB: Gotcha 👍 Thank you, Jack! Everything is clear for me
Jack du Rose: If you do something useful for the Metacolony, then you’ll earn its native token, CLNY, and with it you’ll earn an equal amount of reputation in the Metacolony, giving you the ability to influence the activity of the Metacolony in the teams in which you’ve contributed value. Owning both CLNY and Reputation in the Metacolony will entitle you to claim a share of Colony Network revenues
Маry Satoshi CLUB: If i will buy CLNY i won’t get any reputation, right?
Jack du Rose: Correct, but you can use that CLNY to stake in a Reputation Miner, to compute reputation updates for th whole Colony Network. When you participate in this Reputation validation process, you earn more CLNY and Reputation. And the more CLNY you have, the greater the probability you’ll be able to validate Reputation. I have an answer to the EtherRouter question:
> The EtherRouter contract is the code that is deployed at the Colony’s address. It is a very simple contract that, for any transaction sent to it, it queries the Resolver contract to find the location (contract address) of the function that transaction is trying to call. It then executes the code it finds at that address the Resolver provides. To update a colony’s version, the resolver used is changed from one that knows where to find (for example) the v4 implementation of the functionality, to one that knows where to find the v5 implementation. In this way, the colony’s address stays the same (because the EtherRouter code does not need to change) but the functionality can be upgraded and added to.
D. Папа Роуч: thank you! i think all techies in Satoshi Club are happy about this answer 👍
Маry Satoshi CLUB: Reputation which i will get from staking can be compared with reputation from staking? I mean that if a whales which want to influence decision making just will buy a big amount of CLNY and stake it will they be equal to those who really did something for the project?
Jack du Rose: Reputation is earned in specific teams, so this reputation would be earned in the “Reputation Mining” team. The proportion of the total CLNY which goes to mining is also constrained and subject to the governance of the Metacolony which may choose to increase or decrease that amount subject to the prevaling sentiment about how such rewards should be compensated. So when you earn reputation, you earn it in the specific team, and any parents of that team. Let me grab you a little diagram
Маry Satoshi CLUB: Sure!
Jack du Rose:

So, if you do some frontend work, you earn reputation in frontend, and also in Dev, and in Root. i.e. it sums up the org structure.
Маry Satoshi CLUB: I understand! Complex system, as i told before 😀
Jack du Rose: but earning frontend reputation, would not mean you have any authority in Backend decisions. Organisations are quite literally complex systems. that’s the academic field which seeks to explain how organisations, and other forms of complex adaptive systems, work. And for clarity, that’s just an example org structure. It could be any set of teams, they are not predetermined. And the higher up the org you go, the more people and reputation there will be
Маry Satoshi CLUB: Thank you, Jack! Really great answers!
Jack du Rose: so it’s not a hierarchical organisation in the traditional sense in which the higher up the hierarchy you go, the more power is concentrated in fewer people. instead the higher up the org you go, the more diffuse the power is among more people
Маry Satoshi CLUB: And it’s good! Btw, how do you call this structure? Democracy?😀
Jack du Rose: Meritocracy. I think democracy is good for nations, not good for organisations. The input of some people is strictly more useful on specific topics than the input of others. This is why we don’t have accountants doing brain surgery and Colony tries to reflect that reality via an entirely decentralised, pseudonymous, and bottom up mechanism
Маry Satoshi CLUB: I see that more and more people are supporters of such views😀
Jack du Rose: And I think we see it in other DAOs too, that participation is very low in voting because most people don’t have something useful to contribute about many detailed decisions. so they’d rather allow other people who do have an informed opinion, take the decision
Маry Satoshi CLUB: Fantastic! I really hope this will work!
Q5 from Telegram user @Derazy
What is Colony strategy that involving community? Does Colony teams create DAO’s infrastructure themselves? How does it go so far?
Jack du Rose: Hmm okay I think I understand the question. So in terms of teams creating DAOs on Colony, for this soft launch we’re onboarding people one by one. We call this the “white glove” onboarding. We’ve got hundreds of orgs queuing up to use colony, but we want to bring them aboard slowly, understand what they want to do, and try to support them in a very hands on way. We really want to help users succeed using Colony. So far, that’s going great.
Маry Satoshi CLUB: So even though you said earlier that you focus on features, do you pay much attention to support?
Jack du Rose: Yes we’re there for our users via Discord, but so far we haven’t had much need to provide support to users. It seems to just work and they understand how to use it. People seem to find the UX very intuitive and love the speed and reliability of xDai. Next?
D. Папа Роуч: thank you! the last question from this part!
Q6 from Telegram user @KeymerS
It is necessary for the company to make an evaluation involving planning, production, marketing and I decide to use COLONY as an organizer, what steps should I follow for your contract?
Jack du Rose: I don’t really understand the question I’m afraid.
D. Папа Роуч: well, maybe this guy meant that he wants to work with you? what steps he should do for this? 😄
Jack du Rose: For now we do most of the work ourselves, but that will change as we cede control gradually to the Metacolony. When governance goes live we’ll start on this process and then it will become easier for external people to contribute. In the shorter term, we’re also soon rolling out a bounty program which will allow contributors to contribute to a bounty colony, and earn a share of a CLNY distribution when the token is released. I think we’ll formally announce the details of that in the next couple of weeks
D. Папа Роуч: bounty program is always nice 👍
Jack du Rose: it’s a pretty cool program though because it has a mechanism whereby the more successful it is, the more CLNY will go to the bounty hunters. We’ll announce this at https://blog.colony.io and on twitter https://twitter.com/joincolony
Маry Satoshi CLUB: Satoshiclubbers! It’s your chance to participate in CLNY distribution 😉 Thank you for your answers, Jack!
Part 2 — live questions from the Telegram community
Q1 from Telegram User @JuanSB07
Within the “Toolkit” or features of Colony I did not find anything about its security and prevention of cyber-attacks or possible hacks. But I could see that something that generates reliability is that Colony is built on Ethereum, but is this enough? What is the security and hacks prevention system they use? If their goal is to create organizations together, online. Is it not possible for one of these organizations to be hacked ?
Jack du Rose: Great question.
One of the most important features of Colony is “Recovery mode”

Recovery mode is your colony’s panic button in case of emergency. Freeze the colony. Fix the problem. Restart your colony via multisig.
Q2 from Telegram User @h1drX
The essential structure of the colony revolves around domains and the permissions that accounts may have in them. Can you explain a bit about domains and permissions? What is the relationship between them? What are the utilities of the six different permissions (recovery, root, arbitration, architecture, funding, and administration)?
@jackdurose
Jack du Rose:
Another good question. Domains == Teams. In each team a member can be assigned permissions, if you want to operate your organisation on a permissioned basis
In most decentralised organisations however, we expect these permissions to be assigned to smart contract “extensions” which modulate the prodigious power of these permissions, and allow users to take safe actions

Root: permission allows the user (or contract) to take actions that affect special funtions relevant to the whole colony. e.g. upgrading the colony network version, or minting new tokens.
Administration: Allows users to create and manage payments (but not fund them)
Architecture: Allows users (or contracts) to create subteams, and set permissions in those sub-teams
In fact, why am i repeating all this, you can see it in the image
Q3 from Telegram User Johnny ℹ️🅿️
👋Hello Jack
Rather than using a system that allow users to influence decisions based on weighted value of the token contribution they hold with the colony platform, you will be using a REPUTATION system. However, reputation is subjective and may be difficult to measure. How do users earn Reputation and how are they determined?
@jackdurose
Jack du Rose: Great question. Absolutely, reputation is subjective. And in fact most decisions an organisation needs to take are subjective. But also the most common thing an organisation does it to be directing funding towards people, e.g. in salaries, bounties, etc, for work that someone does for the organisation. This is the daily operational work that existing governance frameworks are just completely useless at. So, when you get paid by a colony in its native token, you are Reputation points on a 1:1 basis with the number of tokens you receive. Tokens can be transferrable, but Reputation is a non-transferrable attribute associated with an account. And, importantly, it decays over time. So, unlike with token voting based DAOs. Reputation decay means the people who were there at the beginning don’t always have all the influence. Instead, influence reflects the contemporaneous contributions of its active community. If you don’t maintain your reputation by regularly contributing, you lose it relative to those who are contributing.
Q4 from Telegram User @nadee5
🔴How can you indroduce colony simply to invite any newbies of crypto ?
Jack du Rose: Colony is: Organisations, for the internet. Colony makes it easy for people all over the world to build organisations together online, without needing to know or trust one another. Concretely, Colony allows online communities to form, raise money, collectively manage funds, and coordinate activity towards a common goal, without needing to know or trust one another.
1. The ability to structure an organization into departments or teams with their own memberships.
2. To manage a token treasury, and apply budgets to different teams and initiatives.
3. A variety of different kinds of payments, based on a flexible underlying expenditure primitive.
4. To assign authority to members according to a variety of conditions subject to the individual circumstances of the organisation—including reputation earned through consistently valuable contribution to the organisation.
5. To raise funds via token sale, donation, or revenue.
6. It will provide a number of different decision making mechanisms suitable for different use cases and arbitrate disputes in case of disagreement.
7. And the ability for a DAO to make arbitrary transactions with any other contracts on the same chain. So if your DAO needs to govern another protocol, or interact with DeFi, it will be able to do so.
Q5 from Telegram User @Xusuo
I read from your site that Colony’s first governance module lets colonies use new system “Lazy consensus”. Can you explain how does that consensus work for vote system? If possible pls also give with an example so we can understand better
Jack du Rose: Lazy consensus is not our own term. Indeed, many of the mechanisms in Colony are not ones we’ve dreamed up all on our own. Rather the system is informed by the succesful practices in place in many large organisations opperating according to the principles of Responsive or Agile Organisations. You can learn more about these things are https://responsive.org
Lazy consensus specifically, is a term we got from the Apache community, and we think it fits our mechanism pretty well. In all the conversations we’ve had about working DAOs currently, they all agree that consensus formation actually takes place off chain. The on chain vote really only ratifies a decision that is already know. Hence, most votes pass, as most people don’t create proposals they know will fail. So in Colony, rather than making people vote on things they already know will pass, in Colony when someone makes a proposal, if the community agrees, they do nothing at all. Hence “Lazy consensus”. If they do disagree, they can Object and force a vote.
Q6 from Telegram User @Guandog
According to your website, it says this:
“Workers can easily cash out to their bank.”
Do you currently have any kind of FIATS ramps inside Colony?
Jack du Rose: Yes this is definitely something we want to be able to do. We intend to integrate with a service provided by one of our investors called “Exchange API” that will allow users in supported jurisdictions, to back their earnings in supported tokens out to fiat in their bank accounts.
Q7 from Telegram User @topind7
Do you have any email newsletter I can sign up to where I can always get mails about your latest news so as to be updated and be in touch?
Jack du Rose:
Q8 from Telegram User @Abisola1
Where can I buy your token?
Jack du Rose: We’re currently planning our Public token sale. We’re hoping to make it happen next month.
Q9 from Telegram User @ShaLiPon
You mention that soon you will be rolling out a bounty program which will allow contributors to contribute to a bounty colony, and earn a share of a CLNY distribution when the token is released. Allow us to know about that. Can you please inform satoshi clubers if that bounty begin?
@jackdurose
Jack du Rose: Absolutely. I am confident the team at Satoshi Club will help us inform you guys about this program.
Q10 from Telegram User @BlancaSdF
How do you plan to resolve the related issues in DISPUTES? Are you using or inspired by the KLEROS project for this feature?
Jack du Rose: Colony has its own dispute resolution mechanisms which allow disputes to be resolved internally. We don’t currently explicitly support external arbitration, but it is our intention to allow users to escalate disputes to an external third party if they are dissatisfied with the outcome internally.
Part 3 – Quiz Results
In the final part we tested your knowledge in terms of Colony. They’ve prepared 4 questions for this part. The total reward pool for quiz was 300$.
For more information and future AMAs, join our Social Media channels:
English Telegram group: https://t.me/Satoshi_club
Russian Telegram group: https://t.me/satoshi_club_ru
Spanish Telegram group: https://t.me/satoshi_club_spanish
Telegram Channel: https://t.me/satoshi_club_channel
Twitter: https://twitter.com/realsatoshiclub
Website: https://esatoshi.club/
Our partners:
Website: https://colony.io