Pronounced [ik-spans] - Noun
- An uninterrupted space or area; a wide extent of anything: an expanse of water.
- Something that is spread out, especially over a relatively large area: that great expanse, the sky.
- Expansion; extension:
Expanse is a decentralized programmable platform that utilizes and allows for the application of blockchain technology in many facets of life. Expanse is the first stable fork of Ethereum.
Like Bitcoin, Ethereum utilizes a blockchain for security and transparency. Expanse, like Bitcoin, is also tradeable directly as Expanse (EXP). However, Expanse also allows for the creation of “smart contracts”, allowing developers to use blockchain technology, via Expanse, in their own programmable applications.
Expanse is the name of the currency used within Expanse. It is used to pay for computation within the EVM. This is done indirectly by purchasing gas for expanse as explained in gas.
The total supply of EXP is 11.11m+ (numOfBlocksMined*8). The current number in circulation is only 1m+ (numOfBlocksMined*8).
10m is currently being stored in cold storage until the EXP DAO is completed. Then they will be moved into a democratically controlled organization.
The basis for decentralized consensus is the peer-to-peer network of participating nodes, which maintain and secure the blockchain. See Mining.
ExpStats.net is a dashboard of live statistics of the Expanse network. This dashboard displays important information such as the current block, hash difficulty, gas price, and gas spending. The nodes shown on the page are only a selection of actual nodes on the network. Anyone is allowed to add their node to the EthStats dashboard. The Eth-Netstats README on Github describes how to connect.
Gexp continuously attempts to connect to other nodes on the network until it has peers. If you have UPnP enabled on your router or run Expanse on an Internet-facing server, it will also accept connections from other nodes.
Gexp finds peers through something called the discovery protocol. In the discovery protocol, nodes are gossipping with each other to find out about other nodes on the network. In order to get going initially, gexp uses a set of bootstrap nodes whose endpoints are recorded in the source code.