What exactly is a DAO?
As we discussed in one of our articles: The Birth Of AngelDAO we gave a brief history of DAOs. In essence, they are decentralized autonomous organizations. So what exactly does that mean? In an age of digital work people need to organize their efforts may they be coding, making decisions collectively, tracking progress and the merits of its members and many more things like blockchain investing being a pillar. In 2016 we saw the first DAO structure on Ethereum, which eventually lead to a hack. This lead to a bear market for the DAO concept but all of that changed several years later as progression in technology was made. Now there are dozens of DAOs coming to fruition across the globe.
How Colony is advancing DAO technology
Since 2017 the Cofounder of Colony Jack du Rose and team have been working on solving the problems that DAOs have faced and Colony has been at the forefront of making them easier to adopt and use. They allow members to start an organization with structure and incentivize contributors without any coding knowledge. On-chain governance allows for organizations to perform more efficiently. Furthermore anyone can create their own DAO Colony and issue their own token in minutes. Members of a Colony DAO and easily structure and array of projects, departments, teams and circles. Similar to Notion or Google Docs except on the blockchain with tokenized rewards. Colony also allows for reputation tracking so that their aren’t any miscommunications later and team work can be accounted for.
The UI experience also excites us as it demonstrates a simple aesthetic with fund tracking, contributors and reputation points. Colony allows Token supports all existing ERC-20 Tokens and DAI Stablecoins. In many ways a DAO is like a Github repository and the most active Githubs generally help illustrate the activity of each project. If DAOs can be used for every organization it will truly revolutionize how humans work in the future.
Technologies behind Colony and why we are bullish
Colony is built on Ethereum which is the most popular open source decentralized blockchain infrastructure existing today and accessible to anyone in the world. It uses IPFS for distributed storage, file access, websites, applications and data. IPFS has no central entity and cannot be taken offline. It enables OrbitDB a serverless peer to peer database using IPFS to sync databases with peers.
Blockchain has been rapidly gaining adoption each year and we see DAOs as being an integral part of organizations in the future which will make working and building easier and more efficient and enticing for its members as they can benefit DAOs not just work within them. Colony has been building for 4 years and we anticipate huge milestones in the near future of usage.
You can learn more about Colony at colony.io see the app and functionality in action here: How to build a DAO on Colony
