Longtime Bitcoin developer Paul Sztorc has been trying to overhaul Bitcoin’s architecture since 2015, but the broader community hasn’t budged.
So now it has proposed a dramatic step, called eCash hardfork, that involves copying Bitcoin’s code to launch a separate version in August, while giving existing Bitcoin holders equivalent tokens in the new network for free.
The community, however, criticizes the financing part, which involves the repurposing of coins linked to the missing founder of Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto.
What is a hard fork?
Think of a hard fork like a railway line splitting in two. Trains depart from the same station, but at some point the line splits, allowing trains to reach completely different destinations.
When a group of developers cannot reach consensus on a proposed change to Bitcoin’s code, they copy the existing blockchain and launch it as a separate chain, which shares the entire history of Bitcoin up to the point of split, but diverges after the split, moving forward with its own rules, features, tokens, and direction.
This is precisely what happened in 2017, when the debate over Bitcoin’s block size came to a head, resulting in a chain split and the creation of the Bitcoin Cash blockchain with its native token, BCH.
The technical dispute centered on Bitcoin’s 1MB block size limit, which caps the number of transactions that can be processed every 10 minutes when new blocks are added to the blockchain. Therefore, some were in favor of increasing the block size, but the community remained divided, ultimately leading to a chain split.
Sztorc’s eCash hard fork
The proposed hard fork will create a new chain called eCash with native eCash tokens. “Hold 4.19 BTC at the time of the fork, get 4.19 eCash. You can sell it, hold it, or ignore it completely,” he said on X.
The fork is planned for a Bitcoin block height of 964,000 in August 2026. A coin splitting tool will be released to help holders cleanly separate their BTC from their new eCash.
The new chain will be a near-copy of Bitcoin’s existing blockchain, with a key addition called Drivechains, a scaling architecture first proposed by Sztorc in 2015 and officially submitted to Bitcoin developers as BIP300 and BIP301 in 2017 and 2019, respectively.
Drivechains are sidechains linked to the Bitcoin blockchain, allowing seamless movement of BTC between the main chain and sidechains without modifying Bitcoin’s base layer. Each sidechain can operate under its own rules and features, essentially allowing developers to build new features on top of Bitcoin without requiring the entire network to adopt these changes.
Think of drivelines as service roads connected to the main highway. When the highway is congested, drivers can exit the highway and travel on the service road at varying speed limits, then re-enter the highway when it is clear. This way, the highway never changes, but traffic is managed more efficiently and the journey becomes more flexible for everyone.
Seven Drivechains are already in development, Sztorc said on
The controversial part related to Satoshi coins
Sztorc wants to use coins that would have been sent to Satoshi Nakamoto’s equivalent addresses on the new eCash chain to attract investors before the fork goes live, a move he calls necessary but which has irked the community, with some calling it outright theft.
A possible hard fork would bring Bitcoin’s entire transaction history to the new chain. So every bitcoin balance, including Satoshi’s 1.1 million bitcoins left intact in the wallets that moved those coins, would appear as an equivalent eCash balance on the new chain.
As per the plan, less than half of the Satoshi-equivalent eCash coins will be allocated to investors today. The precise mechanism by which this is done remains unclear. But since eCash doesn’t exist yet, the pre-hard fork allocation appears to be a promised credit following a successful hard fork.
The plan, he says, will ensure employees have a tangible incentive to get involved from the start, build momentum and complete the work before launch. Without this mechanism, the project can turn into a “zombie project” delivered unfinished. Worse yet, it could become a centralized project, in which a small group of developers gain outsized control over the direction of the chain.
The industry’s response, however, was negative.
“Taking Satoshi coins is theft and disrespect, and eCash is already used for Lightning payments with Cashu and Fedi. These are bad choices,” said Bitcoin advocate Peter McCormack.
Josh Ellithorpe, Chief Technology Officer at Pixelated Ink, expressed concerns about the precedent this sets and how it could potentially pose a risk to everyone’s BTC holdings.
“eCash, setting a precedent that they can and will steal coins. Now it’s Satoshi, but it could be anyone later. Also misrepresenting the BCH fork, stealing another project’s name and not having replay protection,” Ellithorpe said.
