How does Expanse works?

Expanse incorporates many features and technologies that will be familiar to users of Bitcoin, while also introducing many modifications and innovations of its own.

Whereas the Bitcoin blockchain was purely a list of transactions, Expanse’s basic unit is the account. The Expanse blockchain tracks the state of every account, and all state transitions on the Expanse blockchain are transfers of value and information between accounts. There are two types of accounts:

• Externally Owned Accounts (EOAs), which are controlled by private keys

• Contract Accounts, which are controlled by their contract code and can only be “activated” by an EOA

For most users, the basic difference between these is that human users control EOAs – because they can control the private keys which give control over an EOA. Contract accounts, on the other hand, are governed by their internal code. If they are “controlled” by a human user, it is because they are programmed to be controlled by an EOA with a certain address, which is in turn controlled by whoever holds the private keys that control that EOA. The popular term “smart contracts” refers to code in a Contract Account – programs that execute when a transaction is sent to that account. Users can create new contracts by deploying code to the blockchain.

Contract accounts only perform an operation when instructed to do so by an EOA. So it is not possible for a Contract account to be performing native operations like random number generation or API calls – it can do these things only if prompted by an EOA. This is because Expanse requires nodes to be able to agree on the outcome of computation, which requires a guarantee of strictly deterministic execution.

Like in Bitcoin, users must pay small transaction fees to the network. This protects the Expanse blockchain from frivolous or malicious computational tasks, like DDoS attacks or infinite loops. The sender of a transaction must pay for each step of the “program” they activated, including computation and memory storage. These fees are paid in amounts of Expanse’s native value-token, expanse.

These transaction fees are collected by the nodes that validate the network. These “miners” are nodes in the Expanse network that receive, propogate, verify, and execute transactions. The miners then group the transactions – which include many updates to the “state” of accounts in the Expanse blockchain – into what are called “blocks”, and miners then compete with one another for their block to be the next one to be added to the blockchain. Miners are rewarded with expanse for each successful block they mine. This provides the economic incentive for people to dedicate hardware and electricity to the Expanse network.

Just as in the Bitcoin network, miners are tasked with solving a complex mathematical problem in order to successfully “mine” a block. This is known as a “Proof of Work”. Any computational problem that requires orders of magnitude more resources to solve algorithmically than it takes to verify the solution is a good candidate for proof of work. In order to discourage centralisation due to the use of specialised hardware (e.g. ASICs), as has occurred in the Bitcoin network, Expanse chose a memory-hard computational problem. If the problem requires memory as well as CPU, the ideal hardware is in fact the general computer. This makes Expanse’s Proof of Work ASIC-resistant, allowing a more decentralized distribution of security than blockchains whose mining is dominated by specialized hardware, like Bitcoin.