What Is Truthcoin? The Prediction Market Drivechain on eCash
Updated: 1 day ago
Truthcoin is a prediction market that runs as a drivechain on eCash (ECX). People bet on real-world outcomes, and a crowd of paid voters decides what actually happened. No company, judge, or outside token gets the final say.
Paul Sztorc, the creator of eCash, designed Truthcoin in 2014. His work on Truthcoin led directly to drivechains. This page explains how Truthcoin works and tracks its progress, and we update it as news lands.
Truthcoin at a glance
What it is: a prediction market and oracle, built as an eCash drivechain
Created by: Paul Sztorc, who wrote the Truthcoin whitepaper
Built by: LayerTwo Labs, with open source code on GitHub
Money used for trading: ECX, the same coin as the eCash main chain
Voting token: Votecoin, held by the people who report outcomes
Market types: yes or no, number ranges, multiple choice, and combined markets
Status: see the status section below
What is Truthcoin?
Truthcoin is a peer-to-peer prediction market. You buy shares in an outcome, like who wins an election. If you are right, your shares pay out. If you are wrong, they are worth nothing.
Prices on these markets work like a live forecast. A share trading at 70 cents means the crowd sees about a 70 percent chance. Sztorc has long argued that this kind of signal is a public good.
The hard part of any prediction market is not trading. It is deciding who won. Truthcoin's main invention is a way to settle that question without trusting anyone in charge.
How Truthcoin works
Truthcoin has three moving parts: decisions, markets, and votes.
Decisions
A decision is a question with a clear answer, such as "Who wins the Super Bowl?" Anyone can submit one. Each decision belongs to a voting period, and when the period ends, voters report the answer.
Markets
Markets are built on top of decisions. A market can be a simple yes or no, a number range, or a list of choices. Developer Marc Platt says one market can combine up to eight yes-or-no decisions, giving 256 possible outcomes to trade.
That makes conditional markets possible. Traders could price "Will the stock rise if the company hires this CEO?" That kind of linked forecast is hard to get anywhere else.
Voting and Votecoin
When a decision period ends, Votecoin holders vote on what happened. Truthcoin compares every voter's answers. It uses a math method called SVD to find the answers that honest voters agree on.
Voters who report the truth earn a share of trading fees. Voters who report something false lose part of their Votecoin to the honest ones. Over time, voting power flows toward people who tell the truth. That is where the name comes from.
Platt has said Votecoin is planned to have a fixed supply of one million, with an initial sale at launch. A fixed supply also stops anyone from faking thousands of voters.
Why Truthcoin matters: the oracle problem
Every prediction market needs an oracle. That is whoever decides the final answer. On most platforms today, it is the company itself or an outside group with its own interests.
In 2025, Polymarket faced a dispute over whether Ukraine's president had worn a suit. The answer was settled by holders of UMA, a separate token. Many traders felt the deciders had no reason to get it right.
Truthcoin's fix is to pay voters only when they agree with the honest majority. Lying costs them their stake. Telling the truth keeps them earning on every future market.
Why Truthcoin runs on eCash
Truthcoin needs real money to trade with. Bitcoin never added a way to plug in new chains, but eCash did. It is a Bitcoin hard fork with BIP 300 and BIP 301 drivechains turned on from the start.
On eCash, you move ECX into Truthcoin and trade with it there. Your coins sit in an escrow on the main chain that no single person controls. eCash miners also mine Truthcoin blocks, so they earn its fees.
This is the bigger eCash idea in action. Truthcoin does not need its own coin for trading, so demand for Truthcoin markets is demand for ECX. Learn more on our drivechains page.
A short history of Truthcoin
2014: Paul Sztorc, then a researcher in Yale's economics department, publishes the Truthcoin whitepaper.
2015: Roger Ver backs the project and calls it possibly the most important invention since Bitcoin.
2015: The Augur team builds an Ethereum prediction market based on the Truthcoin paper.
2015: The drivechain idea first appears on the Truthcoin blog, as a way to bring Truthcoin to Bitcoin.
Later: Truthcoin is renamed Bitcoin Hivemind, and drivechains become BIP 300 and BIP 301. Bitcoin never activates them.
2026: eCash forks Bitcoin with drivechains turned on, and LayerTwo Labs builds Truthcoin as one of its sidechains.
Sztorc still goes by "Truthcoin" online today.
Truthcoin status
Last verified: October 27, 2026.
Truthcoin runs on the eCash test networks, using practice coins.
In October 2026, its code was rebuilt on top of Thunder, eCash's scaling sidechain.
BitWindow, the main eCash app, has added screens for Truthcoin trading, Votecoin, and voting.
The team plans to launch Truthcoin on eCash mainnet after the fork, not on day one.
Like every drivechain, Truthcoin must be activated by miners on mainnet, so its slot number may change.
We update this section as Truthcoin moves toward launch. Big news gets its own article, linked from here.
Truthcoin FAQ
Is Truthcoin its own cryptocurrency?
Not for trading. You trade with ECX that you move onto the Truthcoin drivechain. Votecoin is a separate token used only for voting on outcomes.
Is Truthcoin the same as Bitcoin Hivemind?
Yes. Bitcoin Hivemind was the later name for the Truthcoin project. The eCash sidechain implements the Truthcoin and Hivemind protocol.
How is Truthcoin different from Polymarket?
Polymarket is run by a company and settles disputes through UMA token holders. Truthcoin has no company in the middle. Paid Votecoin holders settle outcomes, and lying costs them money.
Can I use Truthcoin today?
Only on the eCash test networks, which use practice coins with no real value. Check the status section above for the latest.
Who builds Truthcoin?
LayerTwo Labs, the company led by Paul Sztorc, builds it. The code is open source on GitHub.
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