Due Diligence Example: Expanse

In the past, I’ve focused on tutorials using various resources to do due diligence. I will continue these but I’ve been asked for an example of my due diligence process on one coin. I chose to use Expanse because it’s a robust project with a lot of information to cover and to look into. This post will NOT cover TA and is NOT a buy signal. In italics under each section heading is what we’re looking for from that section in an ideal project. Due diligence does end up slightly into fundamental analysis, but don’t confuse the two. Overlap? Yes. The same? No.

Expanse Rocket from Expanse Media Kit

Expanse Github

We’re looking for maintained code and development in a long term project, along with multiple developers and development coinciding with announcements and/or roadmap
The Expanse Github is an example of a solid, long term project with continuous development. The github is well-documented, the code is clean, and the commits are plentiful and regular. The github lines up with the regular communication with the Expanse community through the newsletter. There aren’t anonymous developers, simulated github activity or any of the other flags.


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Expanse Bitcointalk

We’re looking for the announcer to be experienced, active, and still part of the team, the announcement to be thorough and contain links to relevant material, and the thread to be free from scam markings, price manipulations, and to have a supportive, responsive team and community
The Expanse Bitcointalk is currently 296 pages long. It’s an interesting read and even the announcement itself is full of information about a hearty project. Of note is that the announcement is made by a legendary member with long term, continuous, and recent activity. The first developer was linked to two other projects and the thread is overall positive with engagement and insight, as well as interaction from the project’s team. The thread is kept up to date and the follow through is consistent throughout the thread. Timelines are noted and for the most part, kept. The thread is noticeably free of people looking to manipulate the price.


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Expanse Team

We’re looking for a multi-member team, consisting of identified individuals and recognizable non-scam experience in the blockchain industry. The developers in particular shouldn’t be anonymous. There should be more than developers on the team and information about the team should be easily found. The history of all team members should be free from association with scams
The Expanse Team is diverse, with varying backgrounds. There are team members with strengths in tech, blockchain, marketing, community building, security, and the financial sector. There are also a few members that have demonstrated a strong idealist nature and a belief in the power of decentralization. The Expanse team is in the midst of bringing on some additional members, so this is accurate per expanse.tech website at the time of writing.

Christopher Franko

Co-Founder / Lead Developer

LinkedIn Twitter Bitcointalk
Christopher Franko is the lead developer, Bitcointalk announcer, and is active in multiple communities as a representative of Expanse. He was involved in two long-term crypto projects prior to launching Expanse.

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James Clayton

Co-Founder / Community Manager

LinkedIn Open Facebook Group Steemit
James Clayton is a Community Manager for Expanse and is hands-on with writing communication from the Expanse team. James worked with multiple other projects prior to cofounding Expanse. He also owns two cryptocurrency Facebook groups, totaling over 70k members, leading a team of around 50 admins and mods in keeping a safe, scam free environment.

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Marcia Danzeisen

Marketing Strategist

LinkedIn Twitter
Marcia Danzeisen is Expanse’s Marketing Strategist. Her LinkedIn proves she is an impressive example of bringing the best from the traditional fintech world into cryptocurrency.

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Sandro Ieva

Director of Art

LinkedIn
Sandro Ieva has an extensive portfolio of work in his field and does clean, innovative design perfect for his role as Director of Art at Expanse.

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Scott Williams

Director of Brand Awareness

LinkedIn
Scott Williams is the Expanse Director of Brand Awareness. He has a MBA and is active with the Borderless Charity aspect of Expanse as Director of Operations.

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Ahmad Siddiqi

Advisory Board Member

LinkedIn
Ahmad Siddiqi is on the Advisory Board at Expanse and is a Developer with Expanse as well. The Advisory Board at Expanse serves more than just an advisory function, they also have a voting function according to Bitcointalk thread.

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Timothy Suggs

Advisory Board Member

LinkedIn
Timothy Suggs has been one of the most accessible members of the Expanse Team and is an Advisory Board Member like Ahmad Siddiqi. Timothy has a diverse background in marketing, entrepreneurship, and media production. Timothy is also a technical team member with years of development on his resume.

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Maurice Beutnagel

Advisory Board Member

LinkedIn
Maurice Beutnagel specializes in innovation management. His expertise and Master’s Degree in the field is an obvious asset to the Expanse team. He’s also an Advisory Board Member.

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Nikola Šarić

LinkedIn
Nikola Šarić is a Physician based in Serbia. Nikola has some writings available online regarding his beliefs about the potential of crypto and decentralization. He created his own exchange of sorts in 2012, ALVA. Be prepared to translate most of the information you can find about Nikola.

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Qiming “Soopnon” Zhao

Marketing/Business Development- China

LinkedIn
HongICO
Soopnon is identified as a liaison with the Chinese market. I’m not sure how he fits into the team outside of marketing or what his role will be going forward with the recent news out of China. There are opportunities in Asia, outside of China regulations, so we will likely have to wait for the dust to settle before having solid answers about the futures of exchanges in China. Much of the information on Soopnon requires translation.

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Asim Ashfaq

Senior Developer

LinkedIn
Asim Ashfaq is an experienced full-stack developer with Expanse, a dApp/crypto enthusiast, and miner. You can see some of his other work online. Most of the information on Asim is available in English, but some translation may be necessary.

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Community, Social Media, and News

The community should be active, the communication from the project consistent, and news should be communicated clearly without price manipulation or leading/loaded language.
Facebook Group Twitter Slack* Reddit Github Telegram Bitcointalk
Expanse is consistently active on many channels and has a robust community interacting on all of them. The Expanse slack has more than 3000 members and the team is responsive and readily accessible with a quick turnaround on answering questions. I’ve personally had questions answered by four different team members there. I advise extreme caution when using Slack. Their discord seems to be much more secure than the standard slack channel has the ability to be and requires phone verification for admission, but you must have an invite to get in. They are routinely posted in the slack.
There is an Expanse Newsletter written by James Clayton @cryptoclub twice per month. While written in support of the project and an official channel of communication, it is free of hyperbolic marketing hype. I find it to be a concise summary of what the Expanse Team has been up to and what they’re focusing in the short and mid-term. It is a good resource for keeping up to date on the project.

Expanse Website

The website should be up to date, informative, well organized, have information on the team, the project, the future, have contact information, and have community information. It should also be well designed and functional, since we are in a tech space.
expanse.tech
The website for Expanse is thorough and generally up to date with links to most of the available resources for the Expanse community. I am impressed with the number of languages available. There are two negatives that I noted. The first, the recent and upcoming events are in need of updating. Second, the domain registration is shielded. The positives far outweigh the negatives with the website being a great source of links about the project. No need to hunt down information on Expanse, it’s readily available and linked. Github, Slack, Social Media, News, Docs, Block Explorer, Markets, Discord, Telegram, and more.
The two most impressive aspects, in my opinion, are the contact information and the docs. The contact information includes both a mailing address and a phone number. That’s nearly unheard of in crypto. The docs are detailed, organized, informative, and maintained. The Expanse documentation is one of the best examples of documentation I’ve seen in crypto and a firm foundation for the Expanse ecosystem going forward. It is notable that the docs are not created nor maintained by the expanse core team, indicative of a strong community outside of the core team.

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Project Positioning

When looking at project positioning, we’re looking for something both achievable and innovative. We are not looking for miracles or promised returns, those are red flags.
The Expanse goals as identified in the Bitcointalk ANN are lofty but achievable. They’re not filled with tech related buzzwords but instead set out to create solutions.

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Borderless Identity Management System (BIMS) and Borderless Charity

BIMS is an innovative way to approach identity. Other Blockchain based projects are working on this problem as well. BIMS looks at a low cost way for the establishment of identities, citizenship, and even nation states. The whitepaper is quite interesting and covers Borderless Charity as well.
Borderless Charity has some lofty goals focused on life sustaining and empowerment resources through partnerships and distribution of funds raised.


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TokenLab

The TokenLab Whitepaper might be the most well designed whitepaper I have ever seen in crypto. It is thorough and covers the Expanse team’s goals to bring a token creation platform to Expanse. The TokenLab ICO is underway and the pre-sale sold out. TokenLab is innovative and uniquely positioned. TokenLab creates a larger barrier to entry for ICO’s as well as a vetting process for ICO’s to occur on the platform, the Expanse team is trying to make sure that TokenLab ICO’s are legitimate and of quality. The barriers aren’t so high as to discourage use of the platform and the LAB token used in TokenLAB is structured to reward those who own LAB tokens. The first two projects on TokenLab have been announced and will still need their own due diligence (PAX and CHKN).

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Expanse Rewards

Formerly known as, Expanse Bonds, Expanse Rewards allows you to lock up your Expanse for a set time period. For locking up your Expanse, you are rewarded a set amount, previously it was in Expanse. Now you are rewarded in EXR, a token that is tradeable and securable offline.

Tech

This section is about understanding dependencies, risks, and outside forces that can impact a project, such as an ERC20 token being impacted by Ethereum’s scalability or lack thereof
Expanse is an Ethereum code fork. This is far different than an Ethereum / ERC20 token or a chain fork (like Ethereum Classic). Picture it as starting out as Ethereum’s twin sister in 2015, but each went off and developed their own style and features. Expanse has its own code, scalability, token protocols in addition to the ones included in Ethereum like ERC20, and features that differ from Ethereum. It has the capabilities of Ethereum and has added onto it. Expanse contracts can be written in Solidity, Serpent, and LLL. It also has the ability to have Ethereum updates implemented if they meet the goals of the Expanse Community. Things like the upcoming Ethereum Metropolis updates, Byzantine and Constantinople, are potentially beneficial to Expanse. Expanse is not dependent on Ethereum or Ethereum updates. Expanse is loosely considered part of the Ethereum ecosystem and is MyEtherWallet compatible. Expanse has expressed that it will be multi-chain / chain-agnostic in the future.

Support and Partners

In a long term project, we’re looking for partners that can advance the goals of the project in a meaningful way and for explanations of why the partnership is more than a lent logo. The partnerships should also be confirmed by the other parties, as certain projects in the cryptosphere have hyped nonexistent partnerships.
Expanse is supported by some of the big names in crypto and in the tech world.

Partner Name	Confirmation? Y/N	Beneficial? Y/N/Note
Ledger	Y	Y
MyEtherWallet	Y	Y
Jaxx	Y	Y
Changelly	Y	Y
HongICO	Y	Depends on China Regulations
CenturyLink	Y	Y
Chankura	Y	Y
GameBoard	Y	Y
Microsoft Azure	Y	Y
Microsoft BizSpark	Y	Y
GeoPay	Y	Y

Finances and Sustainability

We are looking for a sustainable project, not startup culture with foosball tables and daily catered lunches. I look for projects that don’t double dip – you either raise money with an ICO or keep a “premine” not both.
Expanse has been self-funded by the Expanse community. No true premine, no ICO. In crypto, this is nearly unheard of. There is a democratically held premine and the voting structure is publicly defined. There is currently an ICO occurring on Expanse, TokenLab, covered above. It’s part of the Expanse ecosystem and being done by the Expanse team. TokenLab will be used to create tokens and ICO’s for other projects in the future, with the funding serving to fund development, marketing, and more. The first round has sold out.

Current and Upcoming / Roadmap

Recently, Expanse has seemingly focused their efforts on TokenLab. This makes sense, with the many aspects to the TokenLab ICO. The first round of the ICO sold out, it was an Expanse only pre-sale with a 20% bonus. In the near future, the TokenLab ICO is continuing and projects are being launched on TokenLab. The first two TokenLab projects are Praetorian Group and Check In Bar. The TokenLab ICO is expected to fund marketing, development, and some new aspects to the Expanse eco-system. The Expanse/TokenLab team will be attending a few different conferences in the next few months. The Expanse Metropolis update is also expected.

Stats

This section covers what most people look at when they say they’re doing due diligence

Ticker	EXP, EXR, LAB
Price	___
Circulating/Total Supply	7.9m/16.9m
ICO?	Not Really
Anything Scammy?	No
Anonymous Developers	No
PoW/PoS/Other?	PoW

Sources Used

All of these are linked elsewhere in this post. This section is specifically intended to highlight how thorough due diligence is when done right

Table Image created by author
I also googled each of the team members names, names and locations, names and fields, names, fields, and locations, prior companies, prior companies and names, prior companies and locations, and looked for anything that stood out to me. I also looked up each partnership. This would add another 75+ links to the table, but I’m sure you understand that due diligence is more than coinmarketcap.com by now.

Summary

Expanse is a sustainable, community driven, detail oriented project. It’s positioning is ambitious and I think that’s part of the reason people haven’t latched onto it. It seemed a long way off in September 2015. I remember reading the initial announcement and thinking that it was going to take forever and the team would likely burn out. They haven’t and have been plugging away for 2 years. Expanse’s team makes me think of the saying “Eat an elephant one bite at a time.” With their focused and diverse team, they’ve been eating away at the elephant and gaining motivation from each success. They’ve made significant progress and have given me every reason to think they continue delivering on their stated goals and the goals of the Expanse community.
I hope that this serves as an example of what you should be looking for in projects when doing due diligence. Due diligence is to convince you it’s safe enough to consider buying , NOT to convince you “it’s a scam, so don’t buy” after you’ve decided to buy. Default, the neutral is “not buying, it's not safe”. Too many people approach due diligence research from a “convince me not to buy” mindset, not realizing that they’ve pretty much already bought by thinking that way. The burden of proof is on the project to prove they’re legitimate, safe, and doing what they are saying they are. Once due diligence is done then I do fundamental analysis to determine if I want to buy, then TA to determine at what price I want to buy. Due diligence makes crypto safer and scams less rewarding.
Do not let your money depend on the benevolence of strangers

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