Community-driven Avalanche ecosystem accelerator, powered by Colony’s $CLY token. Providing the ecosystem with funding & liquidity.
Saigon 💎 | OIG: Greetings OIG family! We are excited to host our AMA Series today with Colony’s very own Elie Le Rest (CEO). Colony is investing in projects building on the Avalanche ecosystem with a fund governed by its own community.
Welcome to the OIG main stage Elie! Could you please briefly introduce yourself?
Elie: Hey everyone! It’s a pleasure to be here 🙂 I’ll introduce myself shortly
I’m Colony’s CEO, I’m also partner and Co-founder at ExoAlpha, a Hedge Fund with systematic quantitative strategies; long-short exposure to Bitcoin & Ethereum. I’ve gotten in the crypto space since 2013 for the outstanding technology behind it and throughout the years, I’ve structured several digital assets deals, advised security/utility token projects and private corporate blockchain projects. My past traditional finance experiences include Asset and Wealth Management in Paris, New York, at big firms like UBS and Credit Agricole. I’ve also built a crypto quantitative arbitrage trading algorithm in 2016. Last year I wanted to get more involved in the ecosystem and wanted to build a community-driven initiative to empower Avalanche’s growth. This is how Colony’s idea was born.
Saigon 💎 | OIG: Excellent intro! And very diverse financial background Elie. It’s good to see Colony is in good hands here!
Let’s get into it, can you explain to our community what Colony is and does?
Elie: In simple terms, Colony is a community-driven Avalanche ecosystem accelerator, powered by Colony’s CLY token.
Our Mission? Investing across the Avalanche ecosystem, financing early-stage projects, providing liquidity to Defi Protocols, staking & index!
Our open governance mechanism ensures capital is allocated across the Avalanche ecosystem for its sole benefit. The true sustenance and value generated by Colony’s investments is routed back to the Community through airdrops, a buyback mechanism, and staking rewards.
Saigon 💎 | OIG: Very cool model! It seems like one that focuses on pure community development and growth of the AVAX ecosystem as a whole.
How connected are the team to Avalanche? What are the backgrounds and experience of the team?
Elie: Really good question, Colony is already really well connected in the Avalanche ecosystem, I’ll explain:
Colony’s Team is composed of experts with decades of experience and pedigree in the blockchain, and traditional finance space. With the founding of ExoAlpha, a systematic crypto Hedge Fund that has amassed a trading volume of half a billion dollars per month and with over 150 published articles in well-known publications, the team is more than ready to make Colony everything it means to be.
Not only has every member of the team been involved in finance or crypto since the very beginning, but members are active within the community today, and their insight into emerging markets and the latest trends is invaluable.
The team have been following Avalanche since its very beginning, completely amazed by its potential. The element that struck us the most was the technological breakthrough powering the consensus and the subnet customizability built on top, which was the perfect combo: being able to scale with high decentralization.
When it comes to Colony’s involvement, it will be the cornerstone of the avalanche ecosystem. We’ll work closely with the entire ecosystem to provide the best support possible to early-stage projects. We’ve established close ties with the Avalanche Foundation itself, and we’ll be sharing deal flow to create a more fertile ground for projects building on Avalanche, while including the community in their development.
Saigon 💎 | OIG: This might be the first time we’ve had a chance to see a project teamwork so closely with the founding ecosystem. It seems like a great synergy and clearly the experience of everyone shows!
The community is of great value to you. In what different ways will the community be important to this project? How will this project give back to the community?
Elie: Community asks and needs to be at the very heart of the projects. Colony’s Governance allows the community to leverage its knowledge, actions and will. In other words, traditional Venture Capital firms are highly centralized and only benefit their LPs and are not fully aligned with the long-term growth of the ecosystem due to a mismatch between the fund lifespan and the one of the ecosystem. Colony shifts this paradigm upside down: from the start, governance is given to the community with strong incentives aligned with the long-term growth of the ecosystem.
Colony’s CLY token will be used to power the community-driven governance, allowing token holders to vote and have an influence on the capital allocation of Colony:
Voting:
- Changing the fund capital allocation.
- Changing the LP program capital allocation.
- Liquidation of token positions.
- Changing index rules, working principles, constituents, etc
Influencing:
- Sharing Deal Flow with the Fund Analyst Team.
- Providing Analysis on projects.
- Providing ideas to increase the fund’s participation in the ecosystem.
The CLY holders will receive: Avalanche staking rewards, Liquidity provider rewards and Tokens via airdrop of early-stage Colony funded projects.
Saigon 💎 | OIG: Wow. A decentralised VC model with full DAO and governance options for token holders. I’m in.
We read about your two complementary pillars that create value for the users and community, can you explain the first one, The Early-stage program? Have you already started identifying projects building on Avalanche that you are interested in supporting? How do you go about finding projects? Who is in charge of this?
Elie: Colony will invest in new projects building on Avalanche to finance their growth and help them to develop efficiently. As you know, investing in early-stage projects demands resources and analyzing power to invest in the right one. Therefore, Colony’s community will be able to help by providing deal flow, analyzing these projects and so on.
Colony’s rigorous investment process will be performed by Colony’s Core Team, with the help of the Community. Promising projects will be reviewed and scored by a detailed standard analysis note. This investment note will be used by the Investment Committee to make the investment decision.
Currently the team is looking at potential investments but when the application is live and the organization is fully decentralized, the community will take part in this as mentioned.
Saigon 💎 | OIG: Very cool mate, that is one of the biggest criticisms of investing in early-stage projects in blockchain. Is that there is often a lack of research and due diligence due to how fast the entire space moves. Great idea to have a fully invested panel to take care of this for the average investor!
Can you outline colony’s second pillar, the DAO supported Accelerator?
Elie: So, Colony’s mission is to invest across the Avalanche ecosystem, financing early-stage projects, providing liquidity, and supporting existing projects. In addition to investing in early-stage projects, the Accelerator will deploy half of Colony’s capital as follows:
- 10% deployed into layer one (Avax), to validate the network. Colony will diversify this allocation with upcoming subnets.
-10% deployed into an Index (Top 10 marketcap on Avalanche) governed by the community
- 30% deployed as liquidity to power Avalanche DeFi applications.
The Accelerator will evolve into a DAO, designed to support the Avalanche network as it evolves into a dominant Layer One technology. The DAO is the beating heart of Colony, empowering its community to allocate capital that powers the growth of the Avalanche ecosystem.
Saigon 💎 | OIG: Very well thought out. At this point, it appears that Colony may be that catalyst to attract a ton of top tier projects and developers to AVAX!
We would like to know the tokenomics and utility of your token CLY? How does holding your token benefit someone?
Elie: The total Supply is 150 million tokens, there will be no vesting schedule for the public sale. The private sale was open to our early community members and now we’re onboarding the participants. There will be 10% available at TGE, then 15% at the end of the first quarter. After that 25% will be released at the end of every quarter. Seed round participants are locked for 2 years and team and advisors for 3 years.
As mentioned before, CLY holders will receive: Avalanche staking rewards, Liquidity provider rewards and Tokens via airdrop of early-stage Colony funded projects.
Saigon 💎 | OIG: Very good vesting to ensure a healthy price action support from early investors!
We are very interested to hear about your roadmap. What is coming up in the short term that is important for our community to know about?
Elie: Colony will hold its public sale beginning of December, and it will release its application’s first features. The IDO will be held on Avalaunch as for the IEO, we’ll make the announcement soon.
In Q1 2022, Colony shall continue empowering selected projects building on Avalanche according to the deployment strategy we talked about earlier (early token investment, liquidity provider, top 10 Avalanche Index, AVAX and subnets validators).
By Q4 2022, Colony will evolve into a DAO model with its own subnet on Avalanche, building new incentive models for Colony Token holders.
You can check our roadmap on our website for more details: https://colonylab.io
To be up to date on our latest announcement you can also follow us on Twitter 🙂 https://twitter.com/Colonylab
Saigon 💎 | OIG: Amazing! We highly suggest for you guys to check out this roadmap because it’s a good one! 😉
Please outline Colony’s long term plans, what can we expect Colony to look like in the future? How will Colony ensure the sustainability of the project and the value of it for the community?
Elie: This joins what we were saying earlier. Colony’s vision is to evolve into a DAO to power community investments in a fully decentralized manner. The DAO structure will be implemented progressively via a secured infrastructure. In Q1 2023, there will be an expansion of the DAO. There will be a launch of its 2 pillars to sustain the long-term growth of Avalanche: Incubator Integration (with a partnership with Avalaunch) and Liquidity & Capital expansion.
With such a robust team behind Colony, the close ties we’ve established with the ecosystem key-players, our long-term vision and involvement in the market analysis, all of this alongside a strong community which is the beating heart of the project, I believe we are building something great that will certainly become something astonishing in the few coming months and evolve into the strategic cornerstone of the Avalanche Ecosystem.
Saigon 💎 | OIG: We feel pretty confident in the Colony team being able to deliver all of this 🙂
Well Elie at this point I’d like to turn it over to our community questions on Twitter. We had an amazing turnout!
Elie Great! Happy to answer the community questions 🙂
Community Twitter Questions:
Twitter question 1)
Elie: So for Q1: Colony’s application will be released in Q4, and the Community will get to explore its first features end of this year. Other features like Colony’s studio (where developers and other talents upload their competencies and resume to connect to Colony/ Avalanche network) will be available next year.
Saigon 💎 | OIG: Perfect! Thank you for the clarification! For our second question, this one touches on security.
Twitter Question 2)
Elie: That’s a very important question
Colony will be fully audited once smart contracts are deployed, we are not there yet but we have all the connections needed to audit our work. We have 3 solidity developers working hard on the application and we can’t wait to share our first look and feel in the coming weeks 🤗
Saigon 💎 | OIG: Gotcha! Excellent diligence into this part of the protocol!
For our third and final question, you mentioned it briefly before but:
Twitter Question 3)
Elie: Yes I think we already answered some part of this question but let me clarify 😉
Colony is working closely with the Avalanche foundation to support projects on the Avalanche ecosystem, we’re going to share deal flow and co-invest in some projects (we already started). Colony is a bit unique because it will also provide a community to early stage projects, indeed our community will be incentivized to join the projects Colony invests in 😉
I hope it provides more information 🙂
You can always join our telegram group if you have other questions : https://t.me/colonyavax
Saigon 💎 | OIG: Understood! Thank you for the clarification!
Well Elie This about sums up our AMA series between OIG and Colony. Are there any final words you would like to leave with our community? 🙂
Elie: Thank you for the opportunity to engage with your community, I invite people to join our telegram channel to learn more about Colony and to follow us on twitter to stay in the loop 😉
Saigon 💎 | OIG:
We invite everyone to join Colony and follow along as they develop an amazing project and community on AVAX!
Well OIG thank you again for coming out to support. We invite you back here for another exciting AMA tomorrow (details are currently on our Twitter!)
Until then, stay blessed everyone! ✨
COLONY:
Website: https://www.colonylab.io/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/Colonylab
Telegram: https://t.me/colonyavax
