Executive Summary
Colony is a platform for community collaboration. They have a consumer application for projects to incentivize, reward, and track community contributions.They also have a developer platform that makes it easy to integrate incentives and reputation into a first- party site or application.
Challenges
When the Colony team began building their application, they considered building and running their own infrastructure, an undertaking which would have required significant engineering resources. Alternatively, Colony could outsource the expertise but the partner had to be carefully vetted. A subpar solution would have added friction for Colony users and penalized their experience. The team wanted to avoid this at all costs.
Battle-Tested Infrastructure, Built by Experts
By selecting Infura as their infrastructure provider, Colony was able to reduce a lot of overhead and simplify the technical burden of connecting to Ethereum, querying data, sending transactions, and deploying contracts. This freed them to focus on their platform mechanics such as creating and funding tasks, managing delivery of work, issuing tokens, creating domains to group work together, tracking reputation, and distributing rewards to teammates.
Colony believes that the future of work is going to be more open and collaborative. You can learn more about their vision here.