eCash Facts

eCash mainnet is targeted for October 31, 2026, at around Bitcoin block 973,728. That date is the 18th anniversary of the Bitcoin whitepaper. The exact day depends on how fast Bitcoin blocks are found.

The eCash alpha network launched on August 23, 2026, at around Bitcoin block 963,648. The beta network forked on September 19, 2026, at block 967,680. Both are practice networks and neither carries real value.

eCash (ECX) is a hard fork of Bitcoin created by Paul Sztorc and LayerTwo Labs. It activates BIP 300 and BIP 301 drivechains from its first block, so sidechains work on day one instead of waiting for a Bitcoin soft fork. The base layer stays close to Bitcoin.

No. They are two separate projects that share a name. ECX is the Bitcoin hard fork with drivechains, created by Paul Sztorc and LayerTwo Labs. XEC is an older coin from the Bitcoin Cash ABC lineage. Price sites and exchanges currently list XEC under the name eCash, so check the ticker before buying anything.

No. Bitcoin's consensus rules, block times and difficulty are unaffected by the eCash fork. Your BTC stays exactly where it is and nothing about it changes.

You receive 1 ECX for every 1 BTC you hold with your own keys at the snapshot. The ratio is one to one.

No. There is no claim form, no registration and no website to sign up on. If you control the private keys to a Bitcoin address at the snapshot, you control the matching ECX. Anyone asking for your seed phrase or asking you to send coins to claim ECX is attempting a scam.

It depends entirely on that exchange's own policy, and most have not announced one. Holding your own keys is the only way to be certain you receive ECX.

The three launch stages let you split from your Bitcoin separately at alpha, beta and mainnet. This does not multiply your coins. Your mainnet ECX allocation is still one per Bitcoin you hold at the snapshot.

Practice coins from the alpha network burn at 1,000 pECX for 10 real ECX, a ratio of 100 to 1. The minimum burn is 1,000 pECX.

The burn is built into BitWindow's Receive tab, which generates the transaction for you. Coins go to the address 1BitcoinEaterAddressDontSendf59kuE. Your real ECX credit goes to the first address of the wallet you burned from, and rounds up to a whole ECX satoshi.

eCash has 256 drivechain slots in total. Seven sidechains were built by LayerTwo Labs for launch: BitNames on slot 2, BitAssets on slot 4, Thunder on slot 9, Truthcoin on slot 13, zSide on slot 98, Photon on slot 99 and CoinShift on slot 255. Community members have proposed several more, and how many will be working at mainnet is not yet settled.

BitNames handles identity and DNS. BitAssets handles tokens and NFTs. Thunder is for large-block scaling. Truthcoin runs prediction markets. zSide provides Zcash-style privacy. Photon is quantum resistant. CoinShift does cross-coin atomic swaps. Every chain uses ECX, so demand on any chain is demand for ECX.

A BIP 300 withdrawal bundle needs 13,150 miner approvals within a window of 26,300 blocks. At ten-minute blocks that is roughly three to six months. The requirement is counted in blocks, not days, so slower blocks mean longer waits. A bundle that reaches the end of its window without succeeding expires.

A miner proposes the slot in a coinbase message, then other miners approve it in later blocks. The number of approvals needed depends on the network: on the beta network an unused slot activates after more than 1,008 approvals within 2,016 blocks. The value for eCash mainnet has not been set yet. Taking over a slot that is already in use is much harder and needs 13,150 approvals within 26,300 blocks.

Nobody. Deposits sit in a hashrate escrow on the main chain with no key and no custodian. There is no federation, no multisig and no company holding the funds. Withdrawals are approved by miner votes over months rather than signed by anyone.

One sidechain block per mainchain block, at most. BIP 301 allows only one blind merged mining request per mainchain block for any given sidechain. This means every drivechain runs at the pace of the eCash base layer.

No decision has been made, and mainnet is scheduled for October 31, 2026. Paul Sztorc said on October 1 that no change is the best decision, and he has argued since that changing the algorithm is dangerous on principle, calling it "the heart and soul of Bitcoin." A dedicated research group has worked through six numbered options: do nothing, adopt ASERT or something similar, eliminate the block subsidy, switch to a unique non-SHA256 mining algorithm, shorten the retarget window, or add a key that can reset difficulty in an emergency. Paul proposed three of those six himself. His stated plan is to prepare several versions of the software, launch with no change, and deploy an alternative only if that fails. An ASERT implementation has been written as a pull request but has not been merged, and the most-discussed compromise, shipping a replacement that stays dormant until blocks stall, has not been built.

eCash uses Bitcoin's difficulty adjustment, which recalculates only once every 2,016 blocks and is capped at 4x upward and 0.25x downward per window. When rented hashrate arrives, drives difficulty up and then leaves, the chain is stuck at the higher difficulty until it works through the remaining blocks, and because blocks are slower that window itself takes longer to complete. The beta network ran a full cycle of this in October 2026: difficulty sat at 4.00 G through a long slow stretch, dropped 33% to 2.67 G on October 10, drew heavy rented hashrate that produced sub-minute blocks, then lost most of it again before the next adjustment. Paul Sztorc described it on October 11 as "4.00 G was too high, 2.67 G (current diff) is now much too low," with the next reset almost certainly landing too high again. This matters beyond block times, because drivechain deadlines are counted in blocks rather than days. At roughly 20-minute blocks, a withdrawal nominally taking 91 days would take about 182.

No. BitWindow's password encrypts the main wallet, but each sidechain stores its own wallet seed unencrypted on disk the first time you launch it. Anything that can read your files can take your sidechain funds, including malware, cloud backup services, or anyone with access to the machine. Use full-disk encryption and do not keep meaningful amounts on a sidechain.

No legitimate process will ever ask for your seed phrase, and there is no claim form for ECX. Services that hold ECX on your behalf before mainnet are custodial and experimental, so treat anything you send as money you could lose. Check tickers carefully, because the name eCash currently points to a different coin on most price sites.

BitWindow is the main desktop application and runs Bitcoin Core plus the BIP 300/301 enforcer alongside each sidechain. An Android wallet is available on Google Play. The Electrum wallet for ECX is electrum-ecash, which is a different project from Electrum ABC.

Yes, for now. Sidechains need the BIP 300/301 enforcer running next to a synced node, and light mode cannot use them because there is no remote enforcer available yet. Remote enforcer support has been discussed for a future release.

A valid sidechain deposit has to spend the sidechain's existing treasury output and pay it back larger. A light wallet without a reachable enforcer can build a transaction that does not do this, and the resulting transaction can never be mined. BitWindow version 0.2.229 added a cancel feature that clears these. Make sidechain deposits from a full node with a synced enforcer.

Each sidechain ships with very few seed nodes, so a fresh node can fail to find peers and sit at height zero. Community-run seeds are available, including thunder.seed.ecpool.tech on port 4009, and ecpool.tech publishes a connection list for several chains.

Not as a listed coin. ECX is not on any exchange, and no real ECX can be sent to anyone until the hard fork creates the coins on October 31, 2026. What exists instead are wrapped tokens on Solana, and there are now two of them, which are easy to confuse. One is backed by beta practice coins. The other, announced by Paul Sztorc on October 11, is backed by mainnet ECX at an initial price of $10 and an initial supply of 10,000, and it cannot be unwrapped until after October 31. The two trade in separate pools and have been priced well out of line with the 50-to-1 rate between beta and mainnet coins. An official swap run by the project also wraps and unwraps beta coins for a 1% fee. Every one of these routes is custodial or experimental, several stop working before mainnet, and the only route that needs no counterparty at all is holding your own Bitcoin keys at the snapshot. Treat anything you send to a wrapper as money you could lose.