Thunder — Scaling
Live, Slot 9, Official
A big-block, prunable sidechain built for enough throughput for 8 billion people to transact daily. No channels, no inbound liquidity, no failed routes.
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What are drivechains?
A drivechain is a Bitcoin sidechain secured by Bitcoin miners instead of a company or a federation. Drivechains were proposed by Paul Sztorc in 2015 as BIP 300 and BIP 301. They let developers build almost anything (big blocks, private transactions, tokens, prediction markets) on a separate chain, while the main chain stays simple and unchanged.
eCash (ECX) is the first network to turn drivechains on.
Current and Upcoming Drivechains
BitNames — Identity
Announced, Slot 2, Official
Namecoin-style name registration and ownership. A decentralized identity layer aimed at replacing ICANN, with names nobody can revoke.
Guide coming soon
BitAssets — Tokens
Announced, Slot 4, Official
The issuance layer for stablecoins, tokens, and tokenized assets. New assets settle here while the underlying money stays ECX.
Guide coming soon
Truthcoin — Prediction markets
Announced, Slot 13, Official
Peer-to-peer prediction markets, and the idea that started it all. Paul Sztorc has gone by "Truthcoin" since long before drivechains existed.
zSide — Privacy
Voting, Slot 98, Official
Zcash-grade zk-SNARKs on eCash, built on the Orchard shielded-pool design. Sender, receiver, and amount are all hidden.
Guide coming soon
CoinShift — Trustless swaps
Announced, Slot 255, Official
Peer-to-peer swaps between sidechain coins and outside chains, with no exchange in the middle. It supports Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, and Litecoin as parent chains, and ships with a GUI, a CLI, and a JSON-RPC server.
Guide coming soon
Elements+ — Smart contracts
Live, Slot 24, Community
Blockstream's Elements plus OP_CAT, exotic sigs, and CTV, ported to a drivechain. Known as Elements Plus.
Flush — Fast token sidechain
Live, Slot 46, Community
Blocks arrive every 15 seconds, and the exchange is built into the chain. A new token can trade the moment it exists. It is the closest thing eCash has to a Solana style token venue.
Shuttle — Token launches
Voting, Slot 47, Community
Token launch sidechain from the builder of Flush, proposed for slot 47.
Guide coming soon
Solana drivechain — Solana apps
Voting, Slot 8, Community
A Solana sidechain pegged to ECX at 1 SOL per bECX, with 400ms blocks. SPL Token and Raydium run on it at their real Solana addresses.
Guide coming soon
FreeBank — Private money
Live, Slot 130, Community
Scottish free banking from the 1700s, rebuilt in code.
Guide coming soon
Tally — Unknown
Live, Slot 131, Community
Not much is known about this drivechain yet.
Guide coming soon
Snowside — Fast EVM
Announced, Community
An Avalanche EVM subnet for eCash, with native ECX gas, blind merged mining, and USDC bridging via ICM.
Guide coming soon
Sidepot — Pot game
Voting, Slot 88, Community
Pot game sidechain in the style of Fomo3D, proposed for slot 88. Every move is posted on the main eCash chain, so no block producer can front-run it. The link goes to the draft spec. The game's own site, sidepot.cash, is reserved but empty for now.
Guide coming soon
RISCy — Unknown
Unknown, Slot 3, Community
Not much is known about this drivechain yet.
Guide coming soon
Drivechains at a glance
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What it is: A sidechain that Bitcoin miners secure and get paid by
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Proposed by: Paul Sztorc, 2015
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Specifications: BIP 300 (hashrate escrow) and BIP 301 (blind merged mining)
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Status on Bitcoin: Never activated — BIP 300 is still in draft
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Status on eCash: Active from day one
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Peg: Two-way. Coins move from the main chain to a sidechain and back
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Native coin: ECX. Sidechains do not have their own money
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Live on eCash at launch: 7 drivechains
The Problem Drivechains Solve
Bitcoin can't change
Changing Bitcoin's rules takes years of debate and rarely succeeds. Drivechain itself was proposed in 2015 and never activated. Good ideas die in committee.
Sidechains today need trust
Existing Bitcoin sidechains are federated. A group of known companies holds the keys. If they collude or get compromised, the pegged coins are at risk.
Layer 2s pull fees away from miners
Payment channels move activity off-chain, and the fees go with it. Miners fund the security of the whole system, so that trade-off matters long term.
Drivechains answer all three. No base-layer change is needed to add a new one. No federation holds the coins. And miners collect the fees from every sidechain.
How Drivechains actually work
1 A sidechain is proposed.
Miners vote it into a numbered slot. No permission from any company is required.
2 You peg in. You send ECX to a special address.
The coins are locked on the main chain and appear on the sidechain.
3 You use the sidechain.
It has its own rules: bigger blocks, private transactions, whatever it was built for. Miners secure it through blind merged mining, so they earn its fees without running its software.
4 You peg out.
Withdrawals are bundled and voted on by miners over a long window (13,000 blocks on eCash, roughly three months). The delay is deliberate: it gives everyone time to spot a fraudulent withdrawal.
The Honest Tradeoff
Drivechains replace federation trust with miner trust. Miners vote on withdrawals, so a majority of hashrate could, in theory, approve a fraudulent one.
Three things make that unattractive: the 13,000-block window means the theft is visible for months before it completes, the attempt would be public and coordinated, and miners hold long-lived, chain-specific hardware. Critics still consider this the core objection to drivechains. Anyone evaluating ECX should understand it.
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