Welcome to the Colony!
There’s a lot to catch you up to speed on. We’re a group of people experimenting with a new society, soon to be governed as a DAO, and playing together in the app.marscolony.io.
You’ll get the hang of everything (and everything to come) over time, but here are some helpful resources and explanations to get you started:
Player’s Guide
If you want a grand overview of our long-term vision, read the Player’s Guide. It will help you understand what we’re up to here, how you fit in, and where we’re headed together.
It’ll also be updated with long-form lore soon, for anyone interested in the deeper mysteries of our reality.
You can find the guide at guide.marscolony.io
Tokenomic
A general overview of CLNY token (pronounced “Colony” or “Clooneys”), minting speed on each chain, etc.
Roadmap
This one has multiple sources with different purposes (which is why the word “roadmap” isn’t linked):
Live development tracker
The best way to stay informed about what we’re building in any given moment is the live development tracker at roadmap.marscolony.io.
You can see what’s in progress and what we’re planning on a more granular level, and even request your own features, and upvote other feature suggestions to let us know there’s support for an idea.
This won’t capture every dev task, of course, but it’ll definitely help you stay informed and exercise influence over the shape of the Colony, even before the DAO is implemented.
Colony Epochs
From a development standpoint, you can take a bird’s eye view at the colony framework in the epochs description. It’s a post about the different pillars of colonization that are ongoing.
Feature roadmap (static)
The feature roadmap describes the main development milestones of the project. It’s a document we used at the foundation of the project to set a direction, but as with everything, it’s important to remain flexible and adjust with the times. As such, points or timelines on that roadmap are subject to change.
Team and logistics
This header is also not hyperlinked, because there’s not any one place to find all of the information. But, I’ll explain each part below:
Team members
The Mars Colony team is a bunch of Ukrainians and Russians (wild, right?) mixed with a couple extra seasonings from the Middle East/US like yours truly.
We’re all doxxed to Harmony and Polygon, and only Father and I are anon in the community for the 
m y s t e r y
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Father — You don’t need to know yet exactly what he does, but you will, soon.
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Eugene — Chief Product Officer
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Dima (Memological Expedition/MEMEXPO) — Chief Technology Officer
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Jeus (brother) — Your guide/big brother in the Colony, but don’t call me Oniisan (CCO)
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Ivan (Lyagushka) — Product lead
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Marx (Mike) — 3D artist
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Woolly — 2D artist
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Karina — UI artist
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Nadia — Gameplay writer
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Ilia — Developer
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Maxim — Developer
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Nikita — Business development
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Rey — Business development
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Andrey — Business development, security advisor from Zerion protocol
That’s everyone for now, aside from a few who’ve rotated in and out over the past few months in our search for more team members. As the project grows, so will this team.
Funding and treasury
There are multiple different funding sources for Mars Colony. This project was founded and self-funded by a small core team of three people.
A $50k Harmony Grant was approved and then used (in the stages it was granted) to fund the project by covering logistical and hiring costs.
Land sales are the next primary revenue source. The initial land sale of 21,000 NFT land plots on Harmony generated about $1.4 million in revenue.
As the sale of IP, land NFT sales are considered discretionary core team revenue. However, while a portion of that revenue serves to pay or reward the specific members involved in creating and coding the NFTs, because Mars Colony is primarily self-funded, the majority of that revenue (including for each successive land NFT mint on other chains) is how the project survives.
A large portion of the Harmony land sale proceeds was supplied as liquidity for CLNY. More was used to cover hiring and other costs, like the relocation of the core team from their countries at war, conference presence and presentations, software/hardware/server costs, etc. Another portion went to developer rewards, and the remainder of the fund is managed by a small core team DAO we call the CreatorDAO (really just board of core team members for the purpose of managing unconditional core team funds).
“Unconditional” meaning discretionary funds without attached stipulations. By contrast, conditional funds are the community-owned treasury and grants and investments from chains or VCs.
The next NFT land sale will be managed similarly, but with the main portion of funding going to multiplying the team size, acquiring a full-fledged gamedev studio, setting up our HQ in Vietnam (for cost-effectiveness, geographic convenience, and because it’s a beautiful country with great people), maintaining reasonable salaries for sustainable building through a potentially extended bear market (I, for example, as one of the highest-paid core team members, take away just over $4k a month after taxes and have received no bonuses), etc.
Avatar NFTs are not a revenue source, as the CLNY used to mint avatars is mostly burned, with a small portion going to the artist as a royalty. In the case of the Gen1 Harmony avatars, 95% of the CLNY was burned, with 5% going to royalties, but not paying the core team.
None of the in-app/in-game mechanisms generate profit for the core team. Any in-game transaction fees are either burned or added to the community treasury, which contains only CLNY.
Because the treasury is a community-owned entity, the core team is extremely restrictive in its use of the treasury before the DAO has been implemented, choosing instead to use CreatorDAO funds to cover most costs. CLNY rewards to community mediators and artists are granted from the treasury, and some small contractor artist fees that exceeded the core team budget but were necessary for development timelines were temporarily granted from the treasury.
In addition, Harmony’s Project X purchased $237,000 worth of CLNY from the treasury (which is locked for one year from the date of purchase in a multisig wallet) as a venture capital investment in the Colony.
The core team has been extremely careful to not drain the treasury, as we firmly believe it’s something that the DAO will need to maintain the project autonomously in the future. The Project X investment was voted on with a 97% yes rate by hundreds of community voters, and any other draws from the treasury have been far less than the CLNY funneled into the treasury constantly by minting.
The treasury address is: 0x89Ea5CCF7acC1c0319DD16dEe4349879eB6D0965
The $237k investment from Project X has been partially used to fund the salaries of new developers and artists, and the rest remains in a multisig wallet, continually used to cover such salaries, while it lasts.
Future funding will be handled in a way that is consistent to how we currently handle funding — grants/investments in a multisig to cover salaries and expenses while they last, CreatorDAO multisig for growth and expansion, and the community treasury as a last resort while other funding remains, until it is handed to the DAO once implemented. Any significant requests to draw from the treasury (if that is ever necessary), even before the DAO exists, will be subject to a community vote.
Partnerships
As of now, we are supported officially by Harmony and some of their subsidiary projects, and Polygon and Polygon Studios. It’s important to us that the Colony is an attractive and welcoming place to everyone, a wholesome environment that shares the love in each community and through all of crypto.
We’re not chain maxis, we’re multiverse maxis, and believe that, with a little cooperation and trust, there’s enough to go around for every race, gender, orientation (sexual, ideological, or otherwise), species, native universe, etc. We are a home for everyone, everywhere, and it’s up to every colonist to make that a reality.
That’s about the gist of it. If you’ve got more questions, the Colony hangs out in Discord, so join us there!
Forward.
— brother