Espers (ESP) — In Depth Review

Keeping with our idea of reviewing small cap coins, next on deck is Espers. Espers is a Proof-Of-Work/Proof-Of-Stake (PoW/PoS) hybrid blockchain.

Overview:

Espers was launched in April of 2016. Announcement on Bitcointalk here.

Website: https://espers.io/

Discord: Invite here, good activity.

Telegram: https://t.me/EspersCoin

Algo: HMQ1725

Max Supply: 50 Billion ESP

Current Circulation: ~21 Billion (according to Coinmarketcap)

Pre-mine: 25% total. 20% (10 billion ESP) was distributed for free to users in April of 2016 via Airdrop. 5% (2.5 billion ESP) was divided equally between the 6 devs to fund ongoing development.

Wallets: Desktop (Windows/Mac/Linux), Mobile and Lightweight part of Q1 18 Roadmap.

Exchanges: Coinexchange, Livecoin & Alcurex — (NOTE: DO NOT BUY FROM YOBIT, KNOWN SCAM DETAILED HERE)

Whitepaper: download it here (updated on Feb 20th, 2018)x

Market Cap (on 3/7/18): ~ $10.5M/1,084 BTCx

PROC price (on 3/7/18): $0.000495/0.00000005 BTCx

Overview:

First, unlike many altcoin projects that are clones/forks of another established coin, Espers was founded with an innovative algorithm, HMQ1725.

The team released a whitepaper on Feb 20th, where a lot of the updated information in terms of goals and roadmap is going to come from. If you’d like to see the full whitepaper, you can download it here.

POS/POW Mining Details:

Block Time — Minimum enforced spacing: 3.5 minutes per block Target spacing: 5 minutes per block Max (soft limit) : 7 minutes per block

Proof-of-Work / PoW

Block 0–10: 0 ESP per block (Start blocks)

Block 11–365: 50,000,000 ESP per block (Reserved blocks)

Block 366+: 5,000 ESP per block + network fees (Standard blocks)

Proof-of-Stake / PoS

Block 2125–20,000: 250% annual interest (2-day miscalculation)

Block 20,001- 2,000,800: 25% annual interest (Standard phase) — currently around block 741k

Block 2,000,801- 3,000,300: 5% annual interest (Scale down phase-1*)

Block 3,000,300+: 1% annual interest (Scale down phase-2*)

Maximum Espers Coin Supply Total of: 50,000,000,000 ESP (50 Billion ESP) There were originally 500 billion ESP, but the coin underwent a 10:1 Swap.

Here is an older Roadmap that was posted in October of 2017.

Let’s compare it to the new Roadmap that the team released in the Whitepaper:

First — the team has met it’s commitments that it laid out in October, this is always a good indicator of commitment and strength of the dev team. This being said, much of this was not especially groundbreaking, much of that is to come in 2018.

Overview

The coin isn’t exactly new, being launched in Q2 of 2016, but it’s still being actively developed and continues to improve. This serves as a steady foundation which elevates Espers beyond the “pump and dump” coins that still are actively traded but have minimal ongoing development. The coin’s foundation was also strong in the case that it’s not a clone or fork of another more established technology — CryptoCoderz developed a proprietary algorithm called HMQ1725. Having it’s own algo gives Espers a technological advantage over copies/forks but presents development challenges. If you copy Monero for example, you can use the ongoing development of Monero to incorporate it into your blockchain — this isn’t going to be the case for Espers. Also, this makes mining fairly resistant to ASIC’s, since its unlikely spend the money to create an ASIC for this algo. This creates the potential for ongoing mining profitability for casual miners.

The team underwent a 10:1 Swap, creating what most refer to as ESP2. The old ESP1 is essentially worthless now (more than a year after the swap), but this opened a path for people selling on Yobit to scam unsuspecting users by selling them ESP1 vs ESP2. If you decide to purchase ESP, buy it from one of their recommended exchanges, such as CoinExchange.io.

Achieving some of the goals for 2018, such as X-Nodes, Sidechains, and SiteOnChain would be game-changers — this would likely increase the value of the coin exponentially. This is however a binary event, and while the whitepaper and roadmap aren’t commitments from the dev team, the community will hold them to account if they aren’t making progress. As we’ve seen in countless ICO Whitepapers, buzzwords are easy but technological advancements take time.

What we don’t like about Espers:

Anytime there is a premine, it has the potential to create issues for the coin. For Espers, the premine was mostly done in an ethical way and we don’t mind devs having a portion of the premine in order to fund development — as well as ensuring they continue to have skin in the game. There are ways to do this in a more measured fashion, such as escrow, to ensure the team doesn’t just pump and dump the coin. The premine of 25 billion ESP has a market value today of ~$1.2M (after 10:1 swap), with each team member having about ~$200k in equity in this coin. While this is enough for a comfortable existence, the team hasn’t exactly gotten rich from the coin — it’s nearly two years since launch and development efforts are ongoing.

Another questionable part of the coin’s launch was a 2-day “miscalculation” period at the beginning (Block 2125–20,000). This meant that for two days, stakers were receiving 250% annual interest instead of 25%. It’s entirely possible this was just an accident in the early days of development of a new coin, or it was a way to ensure substantially greater gains on their stakes of ESP. Our calculations show that if this was indeed nefarious, they only gained approximately $17k (~$3000 each) by this glitch. Seems like a weird way to risk your reputation in the early stages of launch, therefore it’s more likely this was purely an oversight.

As we’ve mentioned, the roadmap is robust — but also comes with the risk of not being able to accomplish the mission as laid out. Many of these developments would surely increase the value of ESP, but failure would further diminish it’s value & potentially kill it.

What we like about Espers

First off, if you have any concerns about Espers, I recommend going to the Discord channel and chatting with CryptoCoderz (i.e. Jonathan Zaretsky, the Lead Project Manager & Developer). He’s there frequently and very happy to assist the community. We reached out on several occasions during the research of the article & he was extremely responsive and helpful with additional insights/clarification.

On to the Airdrop concerns, the original 10 billion ESP Airdropped were a “gift” to the community. At current valuation, the dev team metaphorically dropped ~$5M from a rooftop to the huddled masses below. Given this, I encourage everyone to read the bitcointalk ANN for the coin — the anger coming from users who got delayed in getting a free coin was mind-blowing. The fact that the devs hung in there and didn’t just give a big “fuck you” to everyone shows more virtue than most, given the circumstances. With all the ICO’s and other shady crap going on with POS coins, it’s refreshing that this coin started with a giveaway to the community. While we all love to think of coins as investments, many coins start as “projects” with the goal of creating utility on the blockchain, which we truly feel is the case with Espers.

As we can see in the roadmap, the dev team at Espers are in for a lot of work to accomplish their goals for 2018. Here is a summary of some of the more exciting aspects.

Hybrid POS/POW: We’re fans of Hybrid POS/POW chains, when the POS portion is distributed in fair fashion. When the Espers team swapped from ESP1 to ESP2, proof of stake functionality became possible — since the new chain was based upon bitcoin version 0.10+. The advantage of a Hybrid chain is that they are typically more decentralized than POW or POS only chains & a 51% network attack becomes extremely unlikely. This obviously isn’t unique to Espers, but an advantage in our opinion.

Site-on-chain — This is essentially a website hosted on the blockchain. The premise is that by doing so, you create an ecosystem that removes the risk of hacking/DDoS attacks — essentially beyond military level security for your website. There is an ICO (Hostcoin, whitepaper here) that is working on a similar approach — but it feels theoretical without the technical details on how to achieve Site-on-chain in the real world.

X-Nodes — Page 17 of the whitepaper for a more thorough description. X-Nodes are similar to Masternodes in function, but more decentralized & don’t require minimum balances or experience. By becoming an X-Node, a user registers on the network to process additional data & storing sidechains. VeChain has committed to a similar goal in their most recent announcement (view it here), but their approach is significantly more demanding on their users. There is a one-time buy in, if you miss the opportunity it will never be offered again. Also, if you ever downgrade, you will never be able to become an X-Node again. The ESP approach is much more community driven and flexible. There is no minimum size and you can remove all the coins from the x-node at any time, and start your x-node back up at any time. There are penalties in terms of voting & rewards for doing so, but at least you’ll never lose your flexibility.

In the end, it appears VeChain is considerably further down the technological path, which is what you’d expect from a top 20 token with significant investment behind it, but Espers is working on a path that will be much more amenable to the crypto community if/when brought to fruition.

Verdict — Speculative Buy

The roadmap, wow…it’s impressive for a coin with only a $10M marketcap (especially when compared to VeChain’s $1.9 billion marketcap). With some success and building of awareness, a 10–20x increase in value is entirely possible in the short term. The investment is not without it’s risks, but the dev team has been meeting their commitments as of late. Couple this with them being extremely engaged with the community, the foundation for growth is there. The community is picking up steam as well, over the last two weeks 50+ subscribers have joined the Reddit Sub — compared to it taking 2 months to get 50 new subscribers not long ago.

It doesn’t take much of an investment ($100 would buy you ~200k ESP) to begin staking the coin. Even with the risks, the upside warrants a speculative buy.

As Espers roadmap advances, we’ll continue to update our analysis and commentary.

Disclosure:

We currently have no holdings of ESP and do not plan to initiate a position in the next 48 hours. This is not investment advice, continue to do your own research before buying/selling any coin. We hope that these insights and the associated links included will aid you in making an educated decision.

Sources:

https://espers.io

https://blog.espers.io

https://www.reddit.com/r/esperscoin/

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1434700.0

https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/espers/#markets

https://steemit.com/cryptocurrency/@brocksampson/yobit-the-great-espers-scam

Espers Discord Channel