36 posts
October 30, 2026
On October 29th 2026, eCash became a live Bitcoin fork with real if transient hashrate, five activated sidechains, one native market, one wrapped market, a list of broken websites and a founder who says he expected worse.
October 10, 2026
Three weeks later the beta has become something more useful than a launch party: a long, sometimes grumpy, often brilliant rehearsal in which most of the heavy lifting was done by people LayerTwo Labs does not pay.
September 20, 2026
The last fortnight of the eCash alpha: the Lukecoin price circus, Liquid's cautionary tale echoing, six sidechains racing for slots, the great pECX burn, the community pooling its small change, and a betanet that went from proposal to retarget in a day.
September 12, 2026
On September 6, 2026, roughly 4,000 BTC, worth about $319 million, moved out of the Liquid Network's peg wallet in a transaction the federation never meant to sign. ErgoBTC flagged the pegout(https…
September 7, 2026
In August and September 2026, two veteran Bitcoin developers left the main chain within weeks of each other. Luke Dashjr's BIP-110 fork restricts data and shrinks Bitcoin down to money only. Paul Sztorc's eCash fork adds drivechains and opens Bitcoin up to everything. An honest comparison of the two most consequential Bitcoin forks in years.
September 7, 2026
The second stretch of the eCash alpha: a hashrate hangover, the first production incident, the first community drivechains activated under proof of work, the first withdrawal bundle, pECX price discovery, and a $320 million lesson from Liquid about why federations are not the answer.
September 1, 2026
This is the seventh and final piece in our series covering the seven BIP-300 sidechains shipping with the eCash hard fork, and it's focused on CoinShift.
September 1, 2026
This is the sixth piece in our series covering the seven BIP-300 sidechains shipping with the eCash hard fork. Previous entries covered Thunder(https://ecashblog.com/posts/2026-06-22-thunder-drivec…
August 26, 2026
The first days of the eCash alpha: a difficulty that started at 1, 26,000 blocks in 15 hours, pools being blacklisted by hash rental platforms, a 93 dollar pECX, and a Telegram chat that never slept.
August 19, 2026
This is the fifth piece in our series covering the seven BIP-300 sidechains shipping with the eCash hard fork. Previous entries covered Thunder(https://ecashblog.com/posts/2026-06-22-thunder-drivec…
August 15, 2026
On October 31st, 2026, exactly eighteen years after Satoshi Nakamoto published the Bitcoin whitepaper, a new chain called eCash will split off from Bitcoin, copy its entire ledger, credit every BTC…
August 13, 2026
On August 4th, 2026, with the first phase of the eCash (ECX) hard fork less than three weeks away, Paul Sztorc sat down for a one-hour conversation with the economist who arguably set his entire ca…
August 13, 2026
On the evening of August 10th, 2026, what began as a paranoid war-gaming session about the Coldcard exploit turned into one of the most substantive public Q&As on the eCash (ECX) hard fork to date.…
August 7, 2026
Layer Two Labs founder Paul Sztorc has confirmed that the eCash (ECX) hard fork will still begin on August 23rd, 2026, but it will no longer arrive as a single event. Instead, the BIP-300 fork will…
August 5, 2026
This is a summary and analysis of Paul Sztorc's August 3, 2026 appearance on Incrypted, a Ukrainian cryptocurrency media outlet, streamed live on YouTube and X. The wide-ranging ninety-minute conve…
July 30, 2026
This essay reflects upon Paul Sztorc's appearance on "What to Expect When Expecting Forks," hosted by the MARA Foundation and Isabel Foxen Duke on July 30, 2026, roughly nine days before BIP-110's …
July 23, 2026
This is a summary of Paul Sztorc's appearance on the X show "Bitcoin & Chill," hosted by Wicked (@wsbitcoin) on July 22, 2026, and archived on YouTube by Rexpaces. Unlike the friendly eCash Space…
July 20, 2026
The July 15 Ecash ECX Space approached issues such as the fee model, specialized vs general smart contracts, and Ecash's governance philosophy in relation to Bitcoin. Paul Sztorc patiently answered to all questions.
July 20, 2026
On July 18, 2026, at the request of the Stacker News moderator Scoresby, Paul Sztorc sat down for an AMA on one of the most Lightning-friendly forums in Bitcoin. The result was surprisingly positive.
July 19, 2026
The pitch is not that BitAssets invents something Ethereum cannot do. It is that BitAssets does the useful parts without requiring users to buy and hold a separate volatile gas token, and without dragging the entire apparatus of a casino chain along for the ride.
July 18, 2026
BitNames is an attempt to build what Namecoin tried and failed to build fifteen years ago, and to succeed this time by fixing the specific economic and structural mistakes that killed the original.
July 17, 2026
Of the seven sidechains launching at block height 964000, zSide is the one most likely to make privacy advocates and Bitcoin maximalists uncomfortable at the same time.
July 9, 2026
For a decade, Bitcoin has been quietly losing its most thoughtful researchers and engineers to projects with friendlier development cultures. Here is who left, why, and what changes when the doors reopen.
July 9, 2026
The July 8 Space was the most chaotic of the entire run-up, and it was chaotic on purpose. What started as a calm housekeeping session from Paul Sztorc turned into a two-hour free-for-all featuring…
June 29, 2026
A technical and economic briefing for hashrate allocators ahead of the August 21, 2026 fork (block 964,000).
June 22, 2026
Paul Sztorc designed Thunder, a high-volume payments sidechain that gives both big blockers and small blockers what they actually wanted.
June 11, 2026
Two months out from the August 2026 hard fork, Paul Sztorc hosted another two-hour Twitter Space on June 10. The call was lighter on hard announcements than recent weeks but heavier on philosophy, …
June 4, 2026
Bitcoin's breakthrough was game-theoretic: a system in which thousands of mutually distrustful, self-interested actors would, by following their own incentives, produce an outcome that benefited the whole network. Ecash takes this philosophy forward.
June 4, 2026
The word "ecash" is older than Bitcoin. Older than the cypherpunk mailing list. Older than the World Wide Web, in fact. It belongs to a forty-year intellectual tradition of trying to build electronic money that respects human dignity.
June 4, 2026
The bulk of the call was spent doing two things the project has rarely done as openly before: defending the airdrop mechanic to a substantive critic for over thirty minutes, and walking through the technical and economic case for BIP 300's miner-voting design without retreating to slogans.
May 28, 2026
Paul Sztorc proposed the first drivechain design in November 2015. Eleven years later, on August 21, 2026, it finally activates on Ecash. Here is the complete year-by-year record of how we got here.
May 23, 2026
Drivechains let Bitcoin host any experiment on a dedicated sidechain — without launching a new coin, without trusting a federation, and without weakening the main chain. Here
May 23, 2026
Every altcoin since 2011 is an experiment that should have been a Bitcoin sidechain. Drivechains finally make that possible.
May 23, 2026
Drivechains were first presented in 2015. Became a formalized BIP in 2017. Have been promoted as a soft fork for Bitcoin for almost a decade. This could have been an easy activation, which makes everything possible on Bitcoin. But they chose the hard way.
May 22, 2026
Every hard fork doubles the nominal Bitcoin supply on paper, but markets eventually pick one winner — and the loser's coins effectively disappear. Here's why Ecash has a small but real chance of being the one that's left standing, and why complacency is the most expensive position you can hold.
May 22, 2026
On May 20th 2026, Ecash founder Paul Sztorc debates two of the project's biggest critics: Sergio Demian Lerner and Mr. Hodl. The result should serve as an example to all cryptocurrency industry leaders.