eCash ECX: The Bitcoin Fork Explained

ECX (eCash) is a Bitcoin hard fork that copies Bitcoin’s entire transaction history, credits every BTC holder a matching ECX balance, keeps SHA-256d proof-of-work with a one-time difficulty reset, and activates Drivechain sidechains (BIP-300 and BIP-301). It was announced by LayerTwo Labs CEO Paul Sztorc on 24 April 2026, launched an Alpha test chain at Bitcoin block 963,648 on 23 August 2026, and targets a permanent Mainnet at block 973,728, around 31 October 2026. Bitcoin itself is not modified.

Last verified: 13 September 2026, against the project’s integration guide and Bitcoin block data. Block heights are fixed; calendar dates are estimates.

ECX quick facts

Key takeaways

• ECX is a separate network. Your BTC stays on Bitcoin, governed by Bitcoin software and Bitcoin keys.
• Three phases, triggered by Bitcoin block height: Alpha 963,648 (23 Aug, done), Beta 967,680 (about 20 Sep), Mainnet 973,728 (about 31 Oct 2026).
• Alpha and Beta mint practice coins (pECX) with no market value. Permanent ECX exists only after the Mainnet snapshot.
• The node is a fork of Bitcoin Core v31.1 with the same address formats, same SHA-256d mining, and difficulty reset to 1 at the fork block.
• On day one of Alpha the chain produced 25,092 blocks in 13 hours on 3.53 PH/s, and difficulty climbed from 1 to 16.78 million.
• The fork reassigns about 500,000 Satoshi-linked coins to investors on the new ledger. That is the source of most of the backlash.
• ECX is not XEC. The name collision is real and already causing confusion.
• Replay protection is opt-in (a special nLockTime), not automatic. Careless claiming can cost real BTC.

How was ECX born?

ECX is the product of a decade-long argument about how Bitcoin should scale. Paul Sztorc, a Bitcoin developer known online as Truthcoin, first proposed Drivechains in 2015 and formalised them as BIP-300 (Hashrate Escrows, 2017) and BIP-301 (Blind Merged Mining, 2019). The idea: let Bitcoin host optional sidechains, each with its own rules, secured by Bitcoin miners, without changing the base layer for everyone.

Bitcoin Core never adopted either proposal. Bitcoin’s last consensus change remains Taproot in November 2021, the longest quiet stretch in its history. On 24 April 2026 Sztorc, now CEO of LayerTwo Labs, announced on X that he would stop waiting: a new hard fork called eCash would copy Bitcoin’s ledger and activate Drivechains on its own chain. His wording was blunt: if you have 4.19 BTC, you will get 4.19 eCash, and you can sell it, keep it, or ignore it.

The original plan named a single fork at block 964,000 (around 21 August). By mid-July, in a series of public X Spaces, the team had moved to a three-stage rollout with a first snapshot at block 963,648 and the permanent chain deferred to 31 October, the 18th anniversary of the Bitcoin whitepaper. An integration guide for exchanges and miners was published on GitHub and updated on 11 August 2026.

Where does ECX sit in Bitcoin’s fork history?

Bitcoin has been forked many times. Most attempts vanished; a few survived as independent coins. ECX belongs to the “ledger copy plus new feature” family, like Bitcoin Cash in 2017, but with two twists no earlier fork attempted: a deliberate three-stage launch and a modified distribution.

The lesson from the table is that a fork’s survival never depends on the announcement. It depends on sustained hashrate, at least one liquid market, and wallets and exchanges willing to touch the coin. BCH had all three within days. BIP-110 had none. ECX has the first, in small measure, and none of the others yet.

What does the ECX fork actually change?

At the base layer, very little. The Layer 1 node is a fork of Bitcoin Core v31.1, and LayerTwo Labs says it intends to track future Bitcoin Core updates. Address and key formats are identical to Bitcoin: legacy, P2SH and bech32 addresses, the same WIF and xpub/xprv formats, secp256k1 keys. Here is what differs:

The consensus addition is the whole point. BIP-300 defines “hashrate escrows”: a sidechain deposit is a special output on the main chain, and withdrawals back to L1 are bundled and must survive a slow miner vote over thousands of blocks before they can be spent. BIP-301 defines “blind merged mining”: SHA-256 miners earn fees from sidechains without running their software, by committing to sidechain block hashes in the coinbase. Everything else is inherited from Bitcoin so that wallets, explorers and mining software need minimal changes.

The last row of the table deserves attention. Because the fork kept Bitcoin’s network magic and default ports in its pre-launch documentation, an ECX node started carelessly can try to talk to Bitcoin peers. The project’s own guide tells operators to use dedicated data directories, pinned peers and a fork-block hash check. Final parameters may still change before Mainnet.

Which sidechains launch with ECX?

The integration guide of 11 August 2026 lists seven Drivechain L2s prepared for launch, all merge-mined by the same SHA-256 hashrate that secures the L1:

In an August podcast Sztorc mentioned a total of twelve drivechains in development, including two EVM-compatible chains built by community members. A test environment called “drynet” (versions 1 through 4) has been running these L2s together with nodes, wallets, explorers and mining before each public phase.

For a miner, sidechains matter for one reason: BIP-301 fees. Blocks built from the Drivechain-aware template carry sidechain commitments and earn those fees; blocks built from a plain Bitcoin-style template are valid but earn only the L1 reward.

What is the Satoshi coin controversy?

On a normal 1:1 fork, every pre-fork address gets the same balance on the new chain, including the roughly 1.1 million BTC in the so-called Patoshi pattern, an early mining fingerprint widely attributed to Satoshi Nakamoto and untouched since 2010.

ECX does something no previous Bitcoin fork has done: it credits 600,000 ECX to those addresses and redirects about 500,000 ECX to investors who funded the project before launch. Technically this is implemented as 122 whitelisted “repurpose” transactions that are valid by consensus without any signature. Sztorc’s argument, posted on X on 27 April, is that no BTC is taken, that moving BTC requires Bitcoin software and Bitcoin private keys which eCash has neither, and that 600,000 is more than Satoshi received from Litecoin, Ethereum or any other project (zero). He frames the 500,000 as working capital that prevents a “zombie project”, and notes Satoshi remains the largest single holder on the new chain.

Critics, including Casa CSO Jameson Lopp, called the move “outrage marketing” and pointed out that changing ownership on a copied ledger sets a precedent for the new chain’s own property rights. No breakdown of the investor allocation has been disclosed.

This is a legitimacy question, not a technical one, and it matters for miners: the value of a coin you mine depends on whether markets accept its ledger as fair.

What happened with BIP-110 in the same month?

August 2026 had two fork events, and they are constantly confused. BIP-110, the “Reduced Data Temporary Softfork” authored by Dathon Ohm, would have limited arbitrary data (inscriptions, BRC-20 tokens, Runes payloads) in transactions for one year, for example by invalidating new scriptPubKeys above 34 bytes. Its mandatory signalling window opened at block 961,632 on 8 August 2026 with a 55% threshold, far below the 95% used by past soft forks. Miner signalling never exceeded about 2.5%.

Nodes enforcing BIP-110 began rejecting non-signalling blocks, which created a minority chain. That chain produced two blocks in roughly eight hours while Bitcoin produced 48, then stalled. Its activation window ran to block 963,647, one block before the ECX Alpha snapshot. Most reporting treats BIP-110 as dead; the proposal’s own site still claims activation and describes a later switch to a different hashing algorithm, which would take it out of the SHA-256 world entirely.

The contrast with ECX is the useful lesson: BIP-110 had no hashrate behind it, while ECX attracted measurable mining within hours. A fork survives on hashrate and economic acceptance, not on announcements.

When are the ECX dates?

The schedule is defined in Bitcoin block heights. Calendar dates are estimates that shift with Bitcoin’s block rate, so always check the height, not the date.

The Alpha snapshot happened as planned: on mempool.space, Bitcoin block 963,648 carries a timestamp of 01:48:47 UTC on 23 August 2026, and the ECX Alpha chain started from that height with a competing stale block visible at the fork point, which is normal for a chain split. On 2 September 2026 the Bitcoin tip stood at block 965,186, so Beta was roughly 2,500 blocks away at that point.

Each phase forks from Bitcoin again at its own height. Current documentation does not confirm that Alpha balances or transaction history carry over to Beta or Mainnet; the project has said pECX earned in Alpha or Beta can be burned to redeem permanent ECX at a reduced ratio, with 1,000 pECX for 10 ECX given as an example. The final conversion rule was not published at the time of writing.

How is ECX mined, technically?

ECX uses SHA-256d, so every Bitcoin ASIC can mine it without firmware changes: only the stratum endpoint differs. The mining stack described in the project’s guide has three layers:

1. The ECX node, a patched Bitcoin Core that serves block templates even with no peers and during initial sync, and whose fork block is minimum-difficulty by consensus.
2. The BIP-300/301 enforcer, a separate process that wraps the node’s template with sidechain data (proposal and withdrawal ACKs, merged-mining commitments). Blocks built from its template earn BIP-301 fees; blocks built straight from the node do not.
3. A stratum server in front of the enforcer, so ordinary ASICs connect with their payout address as the username. The reference pool pays the finding miner directly in the coinbase, minus an operator fee, which is the same non-custodial solo model SoloFury uses on every coin.

Three rules from the guide matter for anyone pointing hardware at it:

• Coinbase maturity is 100 confirmations, the standard Bitcoin rule. With fast post-fork blocks that arrives quickly in wall-clock time.
• Reorg risk is elevated while difficulty re-equilibrates. Blocks arrive erratically and orphan rates are higher than on Bitcoin. Freshly mined rewards should not be treated as final.
• Coinbase outputs cannot be replayed: they are new post-fork coins that never existed on Bitcoin. Mined ECX is therefore the cleanest ECX to hold.

At difficulty 1 a block takes about 4.3 billion hashes on average, which is why the guide notes the chain is briefly CPU-mineable for roughly the first 2,016 blocks. A single 1 TH/s Bitaxe does 4.3 billion hashes in about 4 milliseconds, which explains what happened next.

What happened at Alpha launch?

The numbers from the first day, reported by Bitcoin.com from the Alpha explorer at 9 a.m. EDT on 23 August 2026, show what a difficulty reset does when real hashrate arrives:

Two things stand out for solo miners. First, the “easy window” of a difficulty reset lasts hours, not days: at 30 blocks per minute a 2,016-block retarget period lasts about an hour. Second, 3.53 PH/s is tiny. Bitcoin’s network is measured in hundreds of exahash; ECX during Alpha was smaller than many single mining farms, and 16.78 million is still around 60,000× below Bitcoin’s difficulty.

For comparison, a difficulty of 16.78 million means a block every 10 minutes at roughly 120 TH/s. At that level one mid-range ASIC is the whole network, and a single Bitaxe would expect a block every few days. That is what a fresh chain looks like, and it lasts only as long as no larger miner notices.

What would your ASIC do at Alpha difficulty?

Expected time to a block is difficulty × 2³² ÷ hashrate. At the Alpha difficulty of 16.78 million, that is about 7.2 × 10¹⁶ hashes per block on average. Applied to common home hardware:

For scale: on Bitcoin the same Bitaxe expects a block roughly every 14,500 years. That gap is the entire appeal of a fresh chain to small miners, and also why it closes within hours: a single farm redirecting 10 PH/s makes the network about four times larger, and the table above shifts accordingly at the next retarget. Difficulty is not a fixed property of a coin; it is a moving average of who showed up.

The practical consequence: mining pECX today is a test, not income. The coins have no market and their history does not carry to Mainnet. Anyone pointing hardware at ECX during Alpha or Beta is learning the chain, not earning from it.

Want to see what “low difficulty” means for a coin that actually trades? The SoloFury Network Radar shows live difficulty and block odds for every SHA-256 coin the pool supports, side by side, so you can compare a chain like ECX against BCH, XEC or DGB on the same scale.

How does replay protection work on ECX?

This is the most technical section and the one that matters most for holders. Because both chains share every pre-fork UTXO and near-identical rules, a transaction signed to move BTC after the fork can be valid on ECX too, and vice versa. Ethereum Classic learned this the hard way in 2016; Bitcoin Cash avoided it in 2017 by changing its signature hash so BCH transactions were invalid on Bitcoin.

ECX did not change the signature hash. Instead, its guide specifies an opt-in scheme: an ECX transaction sets nLockTime = 499999999, a value the ECX rules treat specially and Bitcoin treats as an ordinary, long-passed block-height locktime. The recommended procedure for anyone holding pre-fork coins is:

1. Split on the ECX side first, sending your ECX to a fresh address with the magic nLockTime.
2. Only then move the BTC, ideally also to a fresh address.
3. Keep the magic nLockTime on every ECX transaction, permanently.

Independent analysts still list replay security as an open issue, and the guide itself says the final replay scheme will be published separately before launch. Until it is, the safest holder strategy is to do nothing: coins that never move after the snapshot are never at risk.

Never paste a seed phrase into a fork-claim website. Anyone with your seed controls your real BTC. Legitimate forks can be claimed later, from a fresh address, after the BTC has been moved to safety.

How do I claim ECX safely?

You do not claim ECX before the snapshot; the ledger credits every address that holds BTC at block 973,728. The safe sequence, based on the project’s own guide and on how earlier forks went wrong, is:

1. Before the snapshot: hold BTC in a wallet where you control the keys. Do nothing else. Do not “register”, “verify eligibility” or connect a wallet to any site.
2. At the snapshot: still do nothing. Wait for the official ECX node or wallet release and the published fork-block hash.
3. Split ECX first: using the official software, send your ECX to a new ECX address with the magic nLockTime set. This transaction is invalid on Bitcoin, so it cannot touch your BTC.
4. Then move BTC: send your BTC to a fresh Bitcoin address. Because the ECX side already moved, the BTC transaction has nothing left to replay.
5. Keep them apart forever: never reuse a pre-fork address on both chains, and keep the magic nLockTime on all ECX spends.

If a step requires typing a seed phrase into a website or a browser extension you did not get from the project’s official channels, stop. The fork itself cannot take your coins; a fake claim tool can.

ECX vs XEC: why the name is a problem

XEC is the eCash coin that split from Bitcoin Cash in November 2020 (as BCHA) and rebranded as eCash in July 2021. It has its own chain, its own Avalanche-based consensus layer, a two-decimal denomination, and has traded on exchanges for years. SoloFury has mined XEC since day one; the full picture is in our XEC guide for miners.

ECX reused the eCash name in 2026 for an unrelated Bitcoin fork. The collision is not theoretical:

• GMO Coin warned customers in June 2026 that it might suspend BTC trading, deposits and withdrawals around the ECX Alpha snapshot, and a major market-data site filed that warning under the XEC token page.
• Claim websites and “checkers” that mix the two names are already appearing. Some will be phishing.
• A search for “eCash mining” now returns two different SHA-256 coins with two different tickers.

If a website, wallet or DM offers you “eCash” rewards, check which one it means before doing anything.

What should Bitcoin holders expect?

If you control your private keys at block 973,728, the ECX ledger credits your addresses 1:1. You do not need to register, sign up or “claim” anything before the snapshot. The safest action before Mainnet is no action.

If your BTC is on an exchange or in a fund, the custodian holds the keys and decides. So far the picture is mixed:

• Japanese exchanges GMO Coin, Coincheck, SBI VC Trade and Zaif had not committed to supporting ECX as of late August 2026.
• BlackRock’s IBIT prospectus states the trust will permanently abandon rights to forked or airdropped assets unless SEC rules change, so ETF holders will not receive ECX.
• Sztorc has said the project expects to lean on OTC deals and swaps rather than exchange listings early on.
• There is no market price for permanent ECX because Mainnet has not launched. Expect volatile, thin price discovery if and when a listing appears.

Two more practical points. Receiving a forked coin can be a taxable event in some jurisdictions, so check local rules before selling. And the project has released a mobile wallet (iOS TestFlight and Android) plus BitWindow, a Bitcoin Core front-end with native Drivechain support; anything else calling itself an “official ECX wallet” deserves suspicion.

What should solo miners expect?

Three scenarios are on the table for October 2026, and they map directly to what your ASIC can earn.

Scenario 1: ECX gets a market. If ECX lists on at least one exchange with real liquidity, it becomes a low-difficulty SHA-256 coin with Bitcoin-sized 3.125 ECX block rewards plus BIP-301 sidechain fees. Small chains with real prices are exactly where solo miners have the best odds, which is the logic behind the multi-coin approach in our best coins to solo mine analysis. Difficulty would rise fast as farms point hardware at it; the team itself expects difficulty to settle at a level proportional to the fiat value of the block reward.

Scenario 2: ECX stays unpriced. Hashrate evaporates after the Mainnet snapshot, blocks slow down, and the chain becomes a curiosity. Mining it costs electricity for coins nobody buys.

Scenario 3: a replay incident. If replay protection ships incomplete and users lose BTC, exchanges will refuse the coin regardless of its technical merit.

Nothing about this decides itself before 31 October. The honest position for any pool, including SoloFury, is to watch the Beta phase, wait for the final consensus parameters, fork hash and replay scheme, and add the coin only when it has a verifiable chain, published rules and a reason to exist economically. We will update this article as the Beta and Mainnet heights arrive.

ECX timeline at a glance

• 2015 — Paul Sztorc proposes Drivechains.
• 2017 / 2019 — BIP-300 and BIP-301 submitted; never activated on Bitcoin.
• 24 April 2026 — eCash hard fork announced on X; target block 964,000.
• 27 April 2026 — Sztorc clarifies: 600,000 ECX to Satoshi addresses, about 500,000 to investors.
• July 2026 — Weekly X Spaces; mobile wallet launched; three-stage plan emerges.
• 27 July / 11 August 2026 — Integration guide published and updated; seven L2s listed.
• 8 August 2026 — BIP-110 mandatory signalling begins at block 961,632; minority chain stalls after two blocks.
• 23 August 2026 — ECX Alpha at block 963,648; 25,092 blocks in 13 hours.
• About 20 September 2026 — Beta at block 967,680.
• About 31 October 2026 — Mainnet at block 973,728; permanent ECX.

Where to verify the facts

The claims above come from the project’s own integration guide and X posts, CoinDesk, Bitcoin.com, Decrypt, CryptoSlate, Bitcoin Takeover interviews and exchange notices published between April and September 2026. Primary sources worth bookmarking:

• ECX integration guide (node setup, replay, mining): github.com/ecash-com/fast-facts
• Node source code: github.com/ecash-com/bitcoin
• BIP-300 and BIP-301 texts: bip-0300, bip-0301
• Bitcoin block 963,648 (Alpha snapshot): mempool.space
• BIP-110 proposal site: bip110.org

Cross-check anything that matters against Bitcoin’s own block explorer for heights and timestamps, and against the ECX project’s official channels for parameters. Third-party “claim checkers” are not a source.

If you already run SHA-256 hardware and want to understand what a real solo block looks like on a coin that exists today, start with the Bitcoin for solo miners guide, or run the numbers for your hashrate on the solo mining calculator.