eCash
A hardfork of Bitcoin from Paul Sztorc that activates drivechains and credits every BTC holder an equivalent $ECX balance — rolling out in three stages: Alpha (live now), Beta, and Mainnet at BTC block ~973,728 (on or around October 31, 2026).
What it is
eCash is a hardfork of Bitcoin that activates drivechains (BIP 300 / 301), rolling out in stages toward a permanent Mainnet at BTC block ~973,728 — on or around October 31, 2026. It's led by Paul Sztorc, author of BIP 300/301 and CEO of LayerTwo Labs. eCash starts from Bitcoin's exact ledger — same UTXO set, same addresses, same balances — and at the fork credits every BTC address an equivalent balance of a new coin, $ECX, one-for-one. In the project's words: "no claim, no airdrop form, no whitelist. Run a node, you have it." It is its own blockchain — not a token on Solana or Ethereum — and your existing BTC is untouched; eCash simply arrives alongside it at the same address, to sell, hold, or ignore.
A rolling launch: Alpha → Beta → Mainnet
Rather than a single fork day, eCash is launching in three stages. Each is triggered by a Bitcoin block height, not a calendar date — all three fall on difficulty-adjustment boundaries (multiples of 2,016 blocks) — so the dates below are estimates. As of September 15, 2026, Bitcoin is at block ~967,180: Alpha is live, and Beta is roughly 500 blocks away.
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Alpha
LiveA live-fire rehearsal. The alphanet forked from Bitcoin and credits practice coins (pECX), so anyone can run a node, mine, split coins, trade, and break things before anything is permanent. Eleven drivechain sidechains are already active on it.
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Beta
NextThe focus shifts to integration — exchanges, wallets, custodians, miners, and developers wiring eCash into real infrastructure in a live-use environment. Coins are still practice pECX.
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Mainnet
PlannedThe permanent fork. At this snapshot, real $ECX balances are created one-for-one against BTC, and the first batch of sidechains is expected to go live. Practice pECX from Alpha and Beta is not a permanent allocation — check ecash.com for how, or whether, it carries over.
Why hardfork Bitcoin
Per ecash.com, the fork isn't about broken code — the eCash L1 is a clone of Bitcoin Core. The argument is cultural and about governance: "no meaningful upgrade has shipped since taproot in 2021. Every proposal dies in review — good for stability, and fatal for progress." Sztorc's design lets Bitcoin add opt-in sidechains "without touching the main chain's rules," and Core has declined to adopt it. eCash ships those rules from block one so the sidechain vision no longer needs Core's approval — aiming, the project says, at the industry's two biggest problems: scalability and governance. Notably, the site says the team would abandon the fork if Bitcoin itself activated BIP 300/301.
What to expect at Mainnet
Your BTC is safe: "the fork does not move, modify, or touch your BTC in any way." The mechanics mirror the 2017 Bitcoin Cash split — same UTXO set, addresses, and balances. Because the two chains share history, a BTC transaction can briefly replay on eCash; a one-time coin split using the official wallet separates them automatically ("no technical knowledge required"), after which the chains operate independently. To bootstrap mining, difficulty drops once to its minimum, making the first ~2,016 blocks easy to CPU-mine before it climbs to a new equilibrium. The working software — a full node, wallet, and BitWindow — is already running on alphanet, so all of this can be rehearsed with practice coins before Mainnet.
Sidechains from day one
Because BIP 300/301 are active from the first block, sidechains aren't an afterthought. Eleven drivechain sidechains are already active on alphanet — Layer Two Labs' seven: Thunder (payments), zSide (privacy), BitNames (identity), BitAssets (tokens & NFTs), Photon (quantum-resistant), Truthcoin (prediction markets), and CoinShift (swaps) — plus four newly proposed by independent teams: RISCy, Elements, Snowside, and FreeBank. It's "everything Bitcoin can't do, each on its own chain, none of it forced onto the L1."
Learn more
This summary is drawn from ecash.com's own pages — Why Hardfork, What to Expect, and the FAQ. Treat ecash.com as the canonical source as Mainnet approaches.
Note: eCash is a forthcoming and actively-debated project, and the framing above is the project's own. Specifics — the exact fork block, coin-split steps, and mining details — may change. Verify against ecash.com before acting on anything here. Nothing on this page is financial advice.