Five years ago
When the founders of expanse got together to plan out launching the network we knew that it would be tough. I mean, it was just three of us, a small team with huge ideas. We were ambitious but didn’t have much money, but we recognized there was a need in the market that we could fill so we launched EXP anyways. Armed with nothing but our ideas and experience in the Industry we designed our networks parameters around incentives.
To be more specific, what initially set us apart from the ethereum codebase that we forked was our lack of funding, a valueless reserve of newly minted magical internet money and our drive to give it all value. And so it was. Within a few weeks of our initial launch people resonated with our ideas and saw our potential. We were quickly listed on all the big exchanges, and finally we were worth a few cents each. But then the market fell flat like they often do after the initial shine wears off.
For the first 6 months the three of us didn’t even take our agreed upon allotment of the reserve and we worked. We kept working. Pitching our ideas, drafting new ideas, scraping old ideas, throwing everything we could at the wall to see what stuck and we did more of whatever that was. There is this sentiment in the industry that if you’re failing that you are just trash. That couldn’t be further from the truth. As Elon Musk once said, I’d you aren’t failing then you aren’t innovating. And so we failed.
Then something miraculous happened and we finally achieved what felt like true success. We became one of the fastest rising coins on the market. In one day alone we rose 30,000%. Nothing in the history of crypto has ever risen that fast ever. But like everything in crypto, the fun never last. Because markets and dev cycles rarely correlate. The market is hungry for stories, ideas, with implementations as an afterthought. And new and better stories and ideas came out. And after reaching a crescendo it was time to continue failing, and so we did.
I’ve shared this story to remind you that it’s not our failures that define us but the will to defy. We are defined by the will to keep working, and coming up with new inspiring stories, ideas and to sculpt those into actions and products that add value to people’s lives. I’ve shared this story to show you that we are on the precipice of something truly unique and sustainable, all it takes is you.
For the last 5 years it was the small dev team daring to defy our places in the world by competing with giants. But we made a few oversights. Maybe it was inexperience, naivety or arrogance but we overlooked a few things.
One, we didn’t implement and incentivize standard practices and communication pathways common in open source communities. Two, we had a difficult time crystallizing and communicating our goals to the community, three we did a poor job at distinguishing ourselves from our competitions and lastly although our reserve has lasted 5 years we didn’t consider a sustainable future where the reserve couldn’t sustain development any longer.
But now it’s time to take our next step in our evolution. It’s time to work together to create a unique sustainable solution that sets us apart from the competition.