I have a more serous question about this project. As far as I understand it the only real innovation is the community DAO, which by itself is not really that innovative at all, there are other projects that have already done this.
However as far as I understand it, this is being presented as an alternative to Ethereum. I do not see what is wrong with Ethereum however since its launch was fair. Ethereum still requires a lot of development work, and I do not see how this project will be able to overtake the network effect and development that Ethereum has. I am even wondering if Expanse will be able to keep up with updating when Ethereum is updated and changed.
Furthermore I do not think that the governance of Ethereum is necessarily flawed. If you really wanted to tackle that problem there should have been a allotment in the block reward that allocates a certain percentage to Expanse funding which would then have to be voted upon by some process. Dash and Bitshares are both examples of such a process. Having a singular pre-mine like this which is supposedly decided upon by the community, with such a small group of founders, and small community I do not necessarily see that working out well.
I do not see any type of great innovation or need that this project is filling, besides maybe peoples greed wanting to jump onto the "next Ethereum" as Ethereum is currently going parabolic.
So yes I am here critiquing this cryptocurrency. Please correct me if I am wrong with a convincing argument and I might even invest myself.
This will be personal opinion, and just from myself, but I am not a fan of ICOs and I have never liked them. Having an ICO and a premine feels like double dipping to me, taking as much as possible. if you prefer them then we just disagree a bit, but this is a huge difference. I also think mining is a better means of distribution, more fair, since there are more people with video cards than who can afford buying into an ICO. I also think using a reserve to bring in new talent, rather than raising outside money gives the platform and community more freedom and less outside control.
We have over 200 people in slack, I have over 5000 in the crypto club, and we have around 30k followers on social media total (the team). That is still small of course, but very focused on cryptos, so we do have a small group of loyal people. We also have connections to marketing people and plenty of plans. Certainly there are risks, but we started with nothing and plan on building something amazing out of it. I don't think anyone should get involved unless they want to, but for anyone that likes ETH, it likely wouldn't hurt to keep an eye on EXP as well.