One Miner Blocked Every eCash Drivechain On Launch Day
Updated: 16 hours ago
eCash forked from Bitcoin on October 29, 2026, at block 973,728. The chain came up and has not stopped. Miners showed up in force.
It also launched without the one thing it exists for. Five drivechains were proposed within minutes of the fork, and all five were voted down.
Four hours later most of them activated. The miner blocking them turned out not to be attacking anything. He was being careful with software that was genuinely broken, and he did not know the threshold he was tripping.
The rest of this page is the report as it stood through the day, newest facts first.
Latest updates
October 30, 11:29 UTC. All five sidechains are now live. The eCash mobile wallet lists Thunder, Elements+, Flush, FreeBank and Tally.
October 30, 10:11 UTC. Braiins says it will reopen its hashrate market with 100 PH/s, reporting block times near 20 seconds.
October 30, 06:50 UTC. Paul Sztorc on the broken tooling: "quite a few things have crashed, due to superfast blocks." He expects recovery over 24 to 48 hours.
October 30, 05:12 UTC. Difficulty has climbed past 28G from a 2.6G start. Blocks are slowing as rented hashrate leaves.
October 30, 01:47 UTC. The miner who blocked the proposals identifies himself. It was not Skydoge, and it was not deliberate.
October 30, 00:11 UTC. A new enforcer bug stalls blind merged mining. Stale bids are not dropped fast enough for the current block times.
October 29, 23:25 UTC. One pool, Pow.re, is reported at 51 percent of the network.
October 29, 23:18 UTC. Flush, Thunder and Tally have activated. FreeBank appears to have as well, and Elements+ is close behind.
October 29, 22:42 UTC. The blocking miner has stopped. A second pool is still voting against.
October 29, 22:30 UTC. eSTAMPS is live and working. It is not a drivechain, which is why nobody could stop it.
October 29, 21:30 UTC. All five drivechain proposals have failed.
October 29, 19:00 UTC. eCash forked at Bitcoin block 973,728.
Update: the blockade ended on its own
About four hours after the fork, Lewis posted that Flush and Thunder had activated, with Tally following minutes later. FreeBank's own developer thanked miners for its slot in the same hour. Elements+ came last, and by the following morning all five were live.
Nothing in the rules changed. Two other things did.
The miner doing the blocking stopped. Michael Blowes reported it that afternoon, though a second pool was still voting no. He named the miner as Skydoge, which turned out to be wrong.
And the retry was cheap. A proposal gets a window of 2,016 blocks, which is fourteen days at ten minute blocks. At the two and three second blocks eCash was producing, that window closes in under two hours.
So the broken block times cut both ways. They made the chain unpleasant to use. They also turned a fortnight-long governance cycle into something you could retry before dinner. Lewis resubmitted, and on the second pass the votes were there.
The veto has not gone anywhere. The threshold is still 90 percent, and the arithmetic still hands a veto to anyone above ten. A proposal got through because one party stopped using that power, not because the power went away.
One more fact from the same evening belongs next to that. One pool, Pow.re, was reported at 51 percent of the network. We have not verified the figure and the two events may be unrelated. But a chain whose answer to a ten percent blocker is a bigger miner has not solved the problem.
What happened at the eCash mainnet launch
eCash is a hard fork of Bitcoin, so the launch was set by a block height and not a clock. The trigger was Bitcoin block 973,728.
Bitcoin took its time. The last block before the fork needed about two hours instead of ten minutes. That pushed the launch later in the day than the project had planned.
Then the miners arrived. Hashrate climbed through the afternoon and peaked between 12 and 13 exahashes per second. That is roughly 1.3 percent of Bitcoin's mining.
It is a lot of hashing for a chain that started at a difficulty of 2.6 billion. Blocks came about every two seconds.
The scale of that is easier to see in totals. Three and a half hours after the fork, the chain was past block 977,929. That is roughly 4,200 blocks where ten minute targets would have produced 21.
Fast blocks are not free
Two second blocks sound good and are not. Small pools kept finding blocks at the same moment as large ones, and kept losing the race.
Lewis, the developer behind the Flush sidechain, said most of ePool's blocks were orphaned. The bigger pools submitted at the same moment.
Braiins, a hashrate marketplace, then suspended trading. Its notice said all bids were paused and new orders disabled. Developers in the group said it had also begun blacklisting pools, which made the orphaning worse.
Every drivechain proposal failed on the first pass
Here is the part that matters. The whole point of eCash is drivechains, which let sidechains hold real coins. Five were proposed on launch day and none got in.
Thunder, slot 9, first proposed in block 973,786
FreeBank, slot 130, block 974,156
Flush, slot 46, block 974,164
Tally, slot 131, block 974,178
Elements+, slot 24, block 974,499
Michael Blowes, an independent developer who submitted two of them, reported that both had failed. Lewis said the same of all five, and began rebuilding the submissions from their original on-chain outputs.
Asked at the time which drivechains were live, one developer answered: "there arent any."
Why ten percent of the hashrate is a veto
This is not a bug. It is the activation rule working as written, and we read it from the source.
A proposal for an unused sidechain slot has to collect more than 1,815 miner approvals within 2,016 blocks. Both numbers come from the eCash drivechain enforcer. Its own comment says eCash kept Bitcoin's values here.
Now divide. A proposal needs at least 1,816 of 2,016 blocks to approve it. That is 90.1 percent. It can afford to lose 200 blocks and not one more.
So any miner holding more than about 10 percent of blocks can block every new sidechain. They do not need a majority. They just need to keep mining and keep saying no.
That is what happened for the first four hours.
It was not Skydoge, and it was not sabotage
The miner identified himself that evening, unprompted. He goes by Coinholio in the eCash group.
His explanation matters more than his name. He was not attacking anything. He was not approving proposals because he did not trust the drivechain enforcer at those block speeds. He also did not know the threshold was 90 percent.
"Sorry about delaying the sidechain proposals, didn't realize threshold was 90%. I rightly didn't trust using the enforcer at those block speeds."
He was right about the software. The enforcer crashed repeatedly that day, and a second bug stalled merged mining into the night. Not trusting it was a reasonable call.
We named Skydoge in the first version of this article. That was wrong and we have corrected it. The Skydoge representatives who denied it were telling the truth, and we repeat that here because the accusation travelled further than their denial did.
An accident is worse news than an attack
The first version of this story assumed somebody was attacking the chain. The truth is duller and more worrying.
Nobody set out to block anything. One miner was cautious about broken software and did not know what the threshold was. That was enough to stop every sidechain on eCash for four hours.
A veto that needs an attacker is a problem you can plan for. A veto that trips by accident, because a careful person did a careful thing, is a design problem.
The threshold has not changed.
What eCash can do about it
Three answers came up on launch day. None of them is clean.
Keep resubmitting. A proposal expires after 2,016 blocks, so it can go back up. This only ever works if the blocking miner drops below 10 percent.
Wait for the hashrate to spread out. As more miners join, any one party's share falls. That is a hope more than a plan.
Reorganise around it. Michael Blowes raised the ugly option. If the blocking miner stays above 10 percent, ask the others to use their majority and rewrite its blocks. Another member agreed that an organised majority has the power to do it.
In the end it was the first option that worked, and only because the blocker stopped of its own accord.
What did launch, and why nothing could stop it
One project shipped on fork day and was never at risk.
eSTAMPS is a port of Bitcoin Stamps, from the team behind that protocol. It writes art and SRC-20 tokens straight into eCash transaction outputs, and it has been indexing blocks since the fork.
It is not a drivechain. That is the entire reason it worked.
Stamps live on the main chain, so there is no slot to activate and no vote to win. ECX-native stamps begin at the fork block, 973,728. Because eCash inherited Bitcoin's transaction history, it also inherited every stamp made on Bitcoin before that.
Put the two next to each other and launch day has a clear lesson. Everything that needed permission from miners spent four hours hostage to one of them. The thing that needed nothing from them ran all day.
What else went wrong on day one
The enforcer crashed. Michael Blowes traced a block template panic to a fee accounting underflow, and published a fix. Lewis said replayed Bitcoin transactions were setting it off.
Blind merged mining stalled. Late in the evening Lewis reported a second enforcer bug. Stale bids are not dropped fast enough for the current block times, so bids get stuck.
Replay started. People began replaying Bitcoin transactions onto eCash. This is the exact risk that makes splitting urgent.
The mobile wallet shipped broken. Version 1.4.6 did not pull mainnet network information. Version 1.4.7 build 45 fixes it, so update before you try to use it.
The official explorer went down under load, while the chain was producing blocks every few seconds.
Where it settled
By the early hours of October 30 the chain was calming down.
Difficulty had climbed past 28G from a starting point of 2.6 billion, and blocks were slowing as rented hashrate left. Braiins reported them near 20 seconds and prepared to reopen its market. Paul Sztorc summed up the damage: "quite a few things have crashed, due to superfast blocks." He expects recovery over 24 to 48 hours.
The sidechains have their slots. Most had still not produced a first block, and explorers for Flush, Thunder and FreeBank were standing up empty, waiting.
What this means if you hold ECX
Your coins are fine. The airdrop, the chain and ordinary transactions all work.
Sidechains now exist, but they are hours old and the software around them is still breaking. Flush wallets had not been released when this was written, and merged mining was stalled.
If you held your own Bitcoin keys at the fork, the urgent job has not changed. Replay has already started, so split your coins before you spend any Bitcoin.
If you want to buy, the routes and their risks are in our buying guide.
eCash mainnet launch: common questions
When did eCash launch?
October 29, 2026, at Bitcoin block 973,728. The fork landed about 19:00 UTC, later in the day than planned, because Bitcoin's final block took around two hours.
Are there drivechains on eCash now?
Yes, all five. Flush, Thunder and Tally activated about four hours after the fork, with FreeBank and Elements+ following. Every one had failed its first vote.
Why did the first proposals fail?
Activating a sidechain slot needs more than 90 percent of miners to approve it within 2,016 blocks. A miner with more than about 10 percent of blocks can stop any proposal, and one was.
Who was blocking them?
A miner who goes by Coinholio, who said so himself that evening and apologised. He was not attacking eCash. He did not trust the enforcer at those block speeds and did not know the threshold was 90 percent.
Was it Skydoge?
No. Several people in the group believed so at the time, and we reported that. It was wrong, and the Skydoge representatives who denied it were telling the truth.
What changed to let them through?
The blocking miner stopped. Fast blocks meant the 2,016 block window closed in under two hours rather than two weeks, so resubmitting was quick.
Could a miner block drivechains again?
Yes. The threshold has not changed. Anyone above about ten percent of the hashrate can do the same thing tomorrow, on purpose or by accident.
Did the new difficulty rule work?
It did what its code says. Difficulty rose 12 percent at block 974,016 and again at 974,304, both at the maximum. Our difficulty adjustment article has the detail.
Does this affect my airdrop?
No. You get 1 ECX for every 1 BTC you held your own keys for at the fork. None of this changes that.
Related reading
Sources
Code claims were read directly from the project's own repositories. Launch day observations are from October 29, 2026.
BIP300301 enforcer — sidechain slot activation threshold of 1,815 approvals within 2,016 blocks, release v1.0.1
ecash-com/bitcoin — the eCash node software
Proposal slots, titles and block heights are from the rebuilt submissions published in the eCash developer group
Activation times, the enforcer bugs and the Pow.re hashrate figure are from the public eCash developer group chats, dated in the text
The miner's own account of why he was not approving proposals, and his apology, were posted unprompted in the same group on the evening of October 29, 2026
Correction, October 30, 2026: an earlier version of this article said the rejections came from a miner operating under the Skydoge name, which is what developers in the group believed at the time. That was wrong. We have removed it and named the miner who identified himself
Hashrate figures are explorer estimates reported in the same group and are approximate
Block height and the eSTAMPS fork-block detail were read from the eSTAMPS explorer on October 29, 2026
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