The following 7 factor analysis evaluates the relative risk of investment to the potential return of cryptocurrency Expanse.
1. Expanse has a current circulating supply of 7,746,276 EXP with the total supply being 16,746,276 EXP. If you check the block explorer, it becomes clear that 16,116,417 EXP are stored in exactly 50 wallets with >10,000 EXP each at a total of 22400 wallets. Expanse is hence far away from being as diversified as Ethereum which counts >2m wallets. This on the one hand is disadvantageous as the control over the price is more centralised and theoretically not as spread as Ethereum but on the other hand beneficial as there is plenty of room to grow (early bird adopter).
2. Note that 9,000,000, stored in a disribution wallet, are excluded from circulating supply and not measured into the valuation! Also, those won't be dumped but distributed over time, making Expanse even scarcer.
3. The team is trustworthy and full of expertise in terms of coding (Christopher Franko) and community management / market knowledge (James Clayton), consisting of a 12 person core team and several external developers, inter alia in Pakistan.
4. Coming to the interesting part, what can Expanse actually do?
Have a look at following comparison:
5. The price and valuation:
Expanse has a current price of $1.92 or 7000 Satoshi, respectively, which multiplied by the circulation of 7,746,276 EXP leads to a market cap of $14,835,954.
The technical similar Ethereum has a cap of $20,934,542,582. That is 1411 times more!
Of course, Ethereum plays in another league with its global exposure, ICO hype, the Ethereum Alliance, community etc.
So let's compare Expanse with Lisk, which is a bit closer to the market cap:
Lisk: $226,000,000 market cap, trustworthy team, good marketing and presence, aims to enable easy blockchain dApp development on its own Lisk blockchain, but no public product yet (Software Development Kit launching end of 2017 according to founder Max Kordek at his last Meetup in Berlin).
Expanse is hence undervalued, relatively to comparable cryptocurrencies. If the general valuations of the crypto market is rational is up for debate. Some valuations at about $500m for projects without a launched product seem massively overvalued, when ignoring the future potential success in form of actual usage and revenue (value) generation.
6. Expanse Tokenlab.io ICO is coming soon which requires Expanse to participate. Tokenlab is a platform for launching ICOs. Expanse is hence aiming at a big market, maybe too big with direct competitors as Ethereum, Waves or Counterparty. It could however also turn out to be a big win, in case Ethereum breaks down due to the overdemand of projects launching ICO's of Ethereum's main-net and the search for alternatives starts.
7. To sum up, Expanse indeed is undervalued considering the team's expertise, the technical similarity to Ethereum, the coming entry into the market of "platform for ICOs" and the strong community behind the project. The potential of quickly going viral as an undervalued "gem" is high while the investment risk (that Expanse decreases in value and ultimately shuts down) is rather low.