A Different View on Ethereum: Interview with Expanse Team

26.04.2016

Ethereum’s amazing underlying concept, serious media coverage of the platform and price surge of Ethereum’s native token ETH couldn’t remain unnoticed. Ethereum, just like Bitcoin, now has its own clones, or, in simple terms, forks.

One of such forks is blockchain system Expanse launched without any ICO as a decentralized autonomous organization. Expanse has been announced as early as in September 2015. Currently, it is the 68th in terms of market cap according to Coinmarketcap, with market cap at around $800,000.

The project’s roadmap states eight basic directions of the platform’s development, including public service automatizing services, and services for user values issuance, which are trending these days.

ForkLog contacted Expanse developers to talk about the cryptocurrency’s features and peculiarities.

ForkLog: A plain yet important question: what’s the difference between Expanse and Ethereum in your own opinion? What is the difference between those two blockchain systems?

Expanse: The largest difference is the primary model of operation: as opposed to being controlled by a small closed group foundation, Expanse is openly controlled and managed by its community, and designed with a growing contract infrastructure to facilitate this. It’s members directly collaborate, exchange thoughts and ideas, and vote to determine the project’s future ranging from future development plans to management of the project and its resources.

FL: What incentivized you to clone Ethereum? What’s your own impression of Ethereum?

EXP: We chose to fork for two primary reasons, both due to the project’s open nature. Firstly, the community may (and likely will) at some point decide to differ technologically from Ethereum’s design model, examples of this would be in reward system, a different proof of stake implementation, or an alternative sharding model. Secondly, and perhaps most importantly, the reasoning is that of self-reliance: if we had run Expanse on top of another platform we would be subject to the restrictions imposed by that system. The Expanse model is that so nobody has direct control over it, including its own development team, if the case were that we ran on another platform, whatever people maintain that platform would then have implicit technical control or influence over the project. While there is no reason not to assume Ethereum to act benevolently, blockchain technology is rooted in operating in a trustless nature and Expanses implementation is no different. Additionally, aspects such as Ethereum’s relatively high gas cost would be considerably imposing, whereas alternatively Expanse provides a more cost effective solution to the current cost of running contracts and dapps on Ethereum.

FL: Are there any operational projects based on Expanse? If yes, what are they? If no, is there any work in progress?

EXP: There are several in internal projects that are in progress but are currently operating in limited implementations such as Borderless, or the Expanse DAO. Additionally, there are varied third party dApps and contracts, and assets such as the Destiny project which recently migrated from its own implementation to an Expanse asset.

FL: What Expanse development team is engaged in now?

EXP: The team is consistently engaging in a number of developmental tasks. There are many subprojects, maintenance responsibilities, and other developmental requirements consistently under simultaneous development. The primary focus of the development team at the current moment is the contracts and front-end software for the DAO.

FL: How can a regular user find a use for Expanse at the system’s current level of development? Maybe it’s mostly developer-oriented while applications based on it may be useful for regular users?

EXP: While currently the project is developer-oriented, that is changing rapidly. Expanse and Ethereum both are expediently producing a wide array of tools and applications to make use of the platforms more intuitive and user-friendly. The greatest use a regular individual will likely get from either platform is through the dApps running on them. While now there is a limited amount of dApps available, in the future we should have a great variety of them.

Platon Andreev exclusively for ForkLog

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Tags: cryptocurrencies, Ethereum, Expanse