eCash (XEC): The Fork That Taxed Itself

Amaury Séchet built the software that split Bitcoin in 2017, lost the chain he created over an 8 percent developer fund in 2020, and has spent the next six years turning the losing side into the only Bitcoin fork with Avalanche finality and staking rewards. Here is what that experiment has and has not proved.

Halfway through my eight-hour Bitcoin Cash marathon in S17 E26, after Calin Culianu had spent five hours defending the big block cause against every argument Bitcoin maximalists have ever made, I asked him about Amaury Séchet. He did not hold back. “The Greg Maxwell of big blockers,” he called him.

I have interviewed Amaury twice, in S15 E28 and again in S17 E19, and I understand why he stirs that reaction: he is the most consequential developer in the big block story. He wrote the client that forked Bitcoin in August 2017, he led the Bitcoin Cash side through the 2018 hash war against Craig Wright, and in 2020 he tried to make his own team’s funding part of the consensus rules. The rest of Bitcoin Cash refused, and he left with a minority chain that nobody expected to survive. It survived. It is called eCash now, it trades under the ticker XEC, and it has shipped two network upgrades a year ever since.

This article is about the new big blocker chain: what it changed, how it pays for itself, and whether an overlay of staked coins can really do the job that hashrate does on Bitcoin.

Vital statistics

Market figures are a snapshot from 17 September 2026. They will be stale by the time you read this, so treat them as a sense of scale.

Field	Value
Ticker	XEC (traded as BCHA from 15 November 2020 to 1 July 2021)
Category	UTXO hard fork of Bitcoin Cash; shares Bitcoin’s history to block 478,558 and Bitcoin Cash’s to block 661,647
Split date	15 November 2020, Bitcoin Cash’s scheduled upgrade day
Last common block	661,647; first eCash-only block 661,648
Lineage	BTC (2009), then BCH (1 August 2017), then BCHA (15 November 2020), renamed eCash (1 July 2021)
Proof of work	SHA-256d, the same algorithm as Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin SV
Finality layer	Avalanche, written from scratch by Bitcoin ABC; blocks finalized since 14 September 2022, transactions since 15 November 2025 (block 923,347)
Supply	21 million coins in base units, displayed as 21 trillion XEC; 1 XEC equals 100 satoshis; about 20.08 trillion XEC in circulation
Block reward	58 percent to miners, 16 percent to Bitcoin ABC, 16 percent to the Global Network Council, 10 percent to stakers
Staking	At least 100 million XEC per coin, unmoved for 2,016 blocks, on an always-on Avalanche node; about 350 billion XEC staked at the 2026 peak
Market cap	About $143 million, roughly 0.0094 percent of Bitcoin’s and a thirtieth of Bitcoin Cash’s; CoinGecko rank 218
Price	About $7.14 per million XEC; all-time high about $380 per million in September 2021
Hashrate	Difficulty about 0.005 percent of Bitcoin’s
Node software	Bitcoin ABC, version 0.33.0 or later since the 15 May 2026 upgrade

Three forks, one founder

Every big block article in this magazine eventually runs into Amaury. The Bitcoin Cash article covers 2017, when the big block camp left Bitcoin. The Bitcoin SV article covers 2018, when nChain left Bitcoin Cash. This one covers 2020, when Bitcoin Cash pushed away the man who had written the software for both of the previous fights.

Bitcoin ABC was built for a single purpose. In S15 E28 Amaury told me that the original plan was more modest: “the original proposal was to implement the extension block. But then, when it didn’t work… [we] started implementing the BCH fork. And this is how Bitcoin ABC happened.” In the three years that followed he became the dominant voice in Bitcoin Cash development. Kurt Wuckert Jr, who fought against him in the 2018 hash war, remembers the reputation he had then: “at the time Amaury was very much the, oh no, he’s the genius in the room.”

The same qualities that made him effective made him hard to work with. His Twitter bio called him Bitcoin ABC’s “benevolent dictator,” and eCash’s own blog has used the title without irony. Two years later that title would decide the whole dispute.

The 8 percent

In August 2020 Amaury announced that Bitcoin ABC’s November upgrade would include a new consensus rule, the Coinbase Rule. Every block would have to send 8 percent of its reward to an address controlled by Bitcoin ABC. The idea was called the Infrastructure Funding Plan, or IFP. Any miner who did not pay would have their blocks rejected by ABC nodes.

His argument is one I take seriously, and eCash still makes it on its funding policy page. Open source money has never solved its funding problem. OpenSSL protected most of the internet’s traffic with one full-time developer until the Heartbleed bug in 2014. Bitcoin’s answer was Blockstream, which took venture capital from the same financial institutions Bitcoin was supposed to route around. Donations do not pay for senior cryptographers. If a protocol wants professional engineering, the cleanest place to fund it from is the protocol itself.

The rest of Bitcoin Cash did not hear a funding argument. They heard a tax. Calin’s account in S17 E26 is the sharpest I have recorded: Amaury “announced at the eleventh hour that the consensus rules would send 8 percent of the block subsidy to his own wallet,” with no community process. “We quickly scrambled to form another dev team, told all the miners which software to install, and he got the boot.”

Marc De Mesel, who funded Bitcoin Cash development out of his own pocket after the split, gave me the most balanced version in S17 E44. He does not like calling it a dev tax. Dash pioneered the treasury model, Zcash runs a version of it, and he considers the idea genuinely smart. His objection was the implementation.

The money went to an address Amaury controlled, Amaury decided how it was spent, and that clashed with the Bitcoin tradition in which development was always paid for by voluntary contribution. Marc believes that funding a project ruled with that hard a hand would have killed Bitcoin Cash faster than the market could. The community’s answer was Flipstarter, a non-custodial crowdfunding tool in which the money moves only once a campaign reaches its goal.

On 15 November 2020 the new client, Bitcoin Cash Node, shipped the scheduled upgrade without the Coinbase Rule. Most hashrate and every major exchange went with it. From block 661,648 the two chains went separate ways. The majority kept the BCH ticker. The chain enforcing the 8 percent traded as BCHA, Bitcoin Cash ABC, wherever an exchange bothered to list it.

Amaury, for his part, said he would not fight for the name. “No. Such fighting is ultimately destructive for both parties, no matter who wins,” he told Nicole Grinstead around the time of the split. In the eCash interview that followed he described leaving in almost parental terms: “It is always difficult to let your child go, but in this case, there is nothing more I can do to save this child. It has chosen its path.”

Both sides paid for it. Marc counts it as the second of the two splits that broke Bitcoin Cash. BSV took one faction in 2018 and ABC took another in 2020, and each departure cost the community people it could not replace. Several of the Bitcoin Cash developers I spoke to said this was the split that made them walk away for a while.

A million to one

On 1 July 2021 Bitcoin ABC did something no fork had tried before. It renamed the coin eCash, changed the ticker to XEC and the address prefix to ecash:, and moved the decimal point six places. One BCHA became one million XEC.

Nothing changed on the blockchain. According to the project’s own rebrand page there was no token swap and no new chain. The unit you see in your wallet was renamed from BCHA to “bits,” with two decimal places. One XEC is exactly 100 satoshis. Binance and the other exchanges converted balances on their own books, and no coin moved.

Amaury was open about the reasoning. “No other money has eight decimal places. Why should crypto? Cryptocurrencies with a lower unit price also enjoy higher bull market appreciation. Because the eCash team is incentivized by both tech and price improvement, this improvement was a no-brainer.” On relaunch day BCHA ranked 217th by market cap at about $587 million. Bitcoin Cash ranked 12th at $9.2 billion.

The logic is plain once you see it. A coin priced at fractions of a cent, with two decimals, looks like cash. A coin called Bitcoin Cash ABC looks like the side that lost an argument about Bitcoin Cash.

What actually forked

At first, there wasn’t much of a difference. Both chains activated the same November 2020 upgrade, including Jonathan Toomim’s ASERT difficulty algorithm. Everything Bitcoin Cash had at that point stayed on both chains: CTOR, Schnorr signatures, OP_CHECKDATASIG and a 32 MB block limit. Only three things differed:

1. The Coinbase Rule. ABC nodes rejected any block that did not pay 8 percent to the fund. BCHN nodes rejected any block that did. That was the entire fork.
2. No new replay protection. Both chains kept the SIGHASH_FORKID scheme from 2017, so a transaction was often valid on both. Users and exchanges separated their coins by spending them in ways that only one chain would accept, just as they had after the 2018 split.
3. The same software lineage. Bitcoin ABC stayed a Bitcoin Cash client, until it began adding the features that would make it something else.

Those features came later, and Bitcoin Cash never followed them.

Six years of upgrades

eCash upgrades on 15 May and 15 November, the schedule Bitcoin Cash set in 2017.

Date	Change	Nature
15 Nov 2020	Split at block 661,648 over the 8 percent Coinbase Rule; trades as BCHA	Consensus
1 Jul 2021	Renamed eCash (XEC); 1 BCHA = 1,000,000 XEC; two-decimal bits; ecash: addresses	Display only
14 Sep 2022	Avalanche Post-Consensus: staked nodes vote to finalize blocks after they are mined, giving one-block finality; about 80 billion XEC staked at launch	Optional overlay
15 May 2023	Development fund moved out of consensus rules and into miner policy, with Avalanche enforcing it; limit of 50 chained unconfirmed transactions removed	Consensus and policy
15 Nov 2023	Staking rewards: 10 percent of each block goes to one staker, picked by lottery weighted by stake; development fund raised from 8 to 32 percent; miners’ share falls to 58 percent	Policy
4 Apr 2024	Chronik indexer built into the node, which also indexes eTokens natively	Software
Apr 2024	Halving at block 840,000: subsidy drops from 6.25 million to 3.125 million XEC	Schedule
15 Nov 2024	Real-time difficulty adjustment to steady block times on a small share of hashrate	Consensus
15 Nov 2025	Avalanche Pre-Consensus at block 923,347: transactions final in under three seconds, before they reach a block; the staking winner is also chosen ahead of time	Overlay
15 May 2026	Scheduled upgrade; Bitcoin ABC 0.33.0 required	Consensus

Pay attention to the November 2023 row. The fork was about 8 percent. Three years later, 42 percent of every block goes to someone other than the miner. Sixteen percent goes to Bitcoin ABC, 16 percent to the Global Network Council, which funds ecosystem projects, and 10 percent to stakers.

Avalanche, and what it isn’t

eCash’s Avalanche is not AVAX. Both are based on the consensus protocol from the 2018 Avalanche whitepaper by the pseudonymous Team Rocket. The Bitcoin ABC team built its own version from scratch, and it shares no validators, token or network with Ava Labs’ chain. The project repeats this in almost every announcement because exchanges and journalists still confuse the two.

Miners still produce every block with proof of work. Avalanche is a voting layer that sits on top. Any node that has proven a stake of at least 100 million XEC can join, and those nodes repeatedly poll each other about which blocks and which transactions they accept. Once enough of them agree, the decision is final and no longer reversible, however much hashrate an attacker brings later. eCash calls this Avalanche-enhanced proof of work. Critics call it proof of stake bolted onto a Bitcoin fork. Both descriptions are accurate, and the security model depends on both halves.

There is one piece of history the eCash literature leaves out. Kurt Wuckert Jr remembers Amaury pitching Avalanche pre-consensus to Bitcoin Cash during the 2018 hash war, and he reads it as provocation: “I think they were designed specifically to trigger Craig. As soon as the chain split, those conversations went away.” Bitcoin Cash never adopted it. When I asked its developers why, they said they were exploring a proposal called Sunlight “without a proof-of-stake component.” The idea Amaury raised in 2018 shipped seven years later, on the one chain where he had the final say.

When Pre-Consensus went live, Amaury called it “a milestone not just for eCash, but for digital cash technology in general.” In a narrow sense he is right. No other chain in this magazine finalizes a payment in seconds without a second layer.

The funding policy today

Since May 2023 the development fund has not been a consensus rule. It is a miner policy, and the Avalanche layer enforces it by refusing to finalize blocks that break the policy. eCash presents this as flexibility. In its own words, network participants “can collectively change addresses, increase or reduce amounts, and even remove the funding model entirely by changing just a few lines of code in the node software.”

Read that sentence twice. The recipients can change and the funding can be removed, but only through software written by Bitcoin ABC, which is itself one of the recipients, and only through the votes of a staking quorum dominated by the largest holders. Supporters see governance without chain splits, which Bitcoin Cash never achieved. Critics see a development team that has built itself a salary, and the rules that protect it. Both are describing the same mechanism.

How ECX differs from Bitcoin today

Consensus. eCash shares Bitcoin’s blocks to 478,558 and Bitcoin Cash’s to 661,647. After that it looks like a late-2020 Bitcoin Cash chain with three large additions: a four-way block reward, an Avalanche finality layer, and a display unit that turns one coin into a million. It has no SegWit, no Taproot, no Lightning and no CashTokens. Its tokens, called eTokens, live in OP_RETURN data that Chronik indexes rather than in consensus. A “postage” feature lets a sponsor pay the XEC fee so a token user never has to hold XEC.

Scaling. Bitcoin Cash’s answer to Bitcoin is bigger blocks. eCash’s answer is bigger blocks plus faster finality. The published roadmap promises growth from about 100 to 5 million transactions per second through subnets, including a planned EVM subnet and a zero-knowledge privacy subnet. That is still an ambition. Actual traffic fills a small fraction of a 32 MB block.

Security. At 0.005 percent of Bitcoin’s difficulty, about 47 petahashes, eCash’s proof of work alone would be cheap to rent and attack. The project argues that it no longer matters. To reverse a finalized block, it says, an attacker needs a hashrate majority and about seven eighths of the stake, which must also sit unmoved for two weeks. That is a real barrier, but it is smaller than the marketing suggests. At September 2026 prices, 350 billion staked XEC is worth about $2.5 million, or roughly 1.7 percent of the supply. A chain secured by its own coin is only as secure as that coin is valuable, and its stake is worth less than a modest mining farm.

Decentralization. There is one client, Bitcoin ABC, written by a team that receives 16 percent of every block. The entry ticket to staking is 100 million XEC, about $714. That is cheap, but in practice the quorum is small: the project counted 94 staking nodes in 2024. And the funding policy can be changed by the software of the team that benefits from it.

Adoption. eCash’s most concrete achievement is a boring one, and it is real. XEC is listed on Binance, Upbit, Bithumb, HTX and CoinEx. A growing list of exchanges, tracked at scorecard.cash, credits deposits after one confirmation because they trust Avalanche finality. Korbit cut its requirement from thirteen confirmations to one. The Cashtab wallet, the PayButton merchant tool (1,311 transactions on its best day), the Agora token market and eCashChat are all maintained and all work. Whether anyone uses them as money rather than as demonstrations is the same question every chain in this issue faces. With a few million dollars in daily trading volume, eCash’s answer so far is: not many people yet.

Amaury on Bitcoin, six years later

What stays with me from S17 E19 is not only a series of statements about eCash. It is how alarmed Amaury is about what Bitcoin has become. For years he was the man small blockers accused of wanting to change the rules. Now he watches Bitcoin developers seriously debate freezing Satoshi’s coins to defend against quantum computers:

“We went from, like, not even that is possible, this stuff is sacred code… to, well, we’re going to freeze Satoshi’s coins. Which I find to be a staggering change. Ten years ago people would laugh in your face. But now apparently it is on the table, and that scares me much more than a quantum computer at this point.”

When I asked what he would work on if eCash did not exist, the answer surprised me: “Aside from eCash, I probably would have to join Paul [Sztorc] and work on Drivechain.” Nine years after leaving Bitcoin, the man who forked it would still rather extend it than abandon it.

The name problem

A disclosure first: LayerTwo Labs sponsors this magazine. In August 2026 it launched its own hard fork of Bitcoin, Paul Sztorc’s chain with BIP 300 drivechains built in, and named it eCash. When I asked the Bitcoin Cash developers about it, Steve Thurmond called it “a dick move,” a self-inflicted wound before the fight had even begun, and mentioned “murmurs of litigation.” Calin reduced the whole dispute to a line of Python: "ecash" == "ecash" is true, while "bitcoin" == "bitcoin cash" is false. Bitcoin Cash, he pointed out, at least renamed itself on day two.

Then he aimed a parting shot at his old colleague: “It’s the punishment that comes to Amaury. He deserves it.” I said it more gently on air. A man who forked Bitcoin as the real Bitcoin, then launched eCash, is now watching someone fork Bitcoin as the real eCash.

The word predates all of them. David Chaum’s DigiCash sold a product called eCash in the 1990s: private but centralized, exactly the design Bitcoin set out to improve on. Cashu and Fedimint call their Lightning-backed tokens ecash. XEC chose a generic word in 2021 on the grounds that nobody owns a generic word, and in 2026 it is on the receiving end of the same argument. Four things are now called eCash. Check the ticker before the name.

Who is who

Bitcoin ABC and eCash

• Amaury Séchet (“deadalnix”), former Facebook engineer, founder of Bitcoin ABC, author of the 2017 fork that created Bitcoin Cash and of the 2020 Coinbase Rule. Still eCash’s founder and public face; he announced Pre-Consensus at the Electronic Cash Conference in Barcelona in October 2025.
• Antony Zegers, CEO of Bitcoin ABC since 2020.
• Fabcien, lead developer of the Bitcoin ABC node.
• Joey King, lead developer of the Cashtab wallet.
• PiRK, maintainer of the node and its tooling.
• David Klakurka, strategy; his company Blockchain Ventures runs PayButton and Coin Dance.
• The Global Network Council, which gives out the 16 percent ecosystem share of every block.

The other side of the split

• freetrader, pseudonymous lead maintainer of Bitcoin Cash Node, the client assembled in weeks to ship the November 2020 upgrade without the Coinbase Rule.
• Calin Culianu, Bitcoin Cash Node developer, who worked alongside Amaury for years and remains his sharpest critic.
• Marc De Mesel, the investor who funded Bitcoin Cash development after the split and who likes the treasury idea but opposed who controlled the money.
• Jonathan Toomim, whose ASERT algorithm both chains activated on the day they parted.
• The exchanges, which gave BCH to the majority chain in 2020 and quietly converted BCHA to XEC at a million to one in 2021.

The namesakes: David Chaum’s eCash (1990s), Cashu and Fedimint ecash (2020s), and LayerTwo Labs’ eCash (2026).

What eCash proved

• A minority chain can outlive losing its ticker. Bitcoin ABC lost the BCH name, most of the hashrate and most of the community, and six years later it still ships two upgrades a year. Bitcoin SV showed in 2018 that a chain could survive losing the argument. eCash showed in 2020 that it could survive losing the name.
• A rebrand can happen entirely in the display layer. No swap, no new chain, no migration: a million-to-one redenomination that exchanges carried out on their own books.
• Protocol-funded development pays the bills, at a cost. The team has stayed funded through two bear markets without venture capital. In exchange, 42 percent of every block goes somewhere other than the miner, and the recipients write the software that decides where it goes.
• Fast finality on a proof-of-work chain is possible. Pre-Consensus has been live since November 2025, and exchanges rely on it. Whether a staked voting layer belongs in anything called Bitcoin is a fair question, and it remains open.
• Staking security is only as strong as the stake’s market value. About $2.5 million of XEC stands between an attacker and a finalized block. That is more than zero, and far less than the word “secure” suggests.
• Hold your forks. Anyone who held Bitcoin Cash on 15 November 2020 now holds a million XEC per coin, and it cost them nothing.

Will it flip Bitcoin?

No. eCash is worth 0.0094 percent of Bitcoin’s market value, has 0.005 percent of its difficulty, and is a thirtieth the size of its own parent. It is not on a path to overtake Bitcoin Cash, let alone Bitcoin, and its own marketing doesn’t claim otherwise in numbers.

What eCash can claim is narrower and worth saying precisely. It is the only chain descended from Bitcoin that finalizes payments in seconds without a second layer, and it has paid for its own engineering without a venture round or a treasury built from a premine. The price is a block reward shared four ways and a security budget that depends mostly on the value of the coin it secures. The market’s verdict so far is a ranking in the low two hundreds. The accomplishment is that the losing side of the 2020 split is still here, still shipping upgrades, and still arguing.

Scorecard inputs

Criterion	Evidence
Technical ambition	Avalanche Post- and Pre-Consensus on proof of work; protocol staking; real-time difficulty; built-in Chronik indexer; eTokens with sponsored fees; subnet roadmap. The most novel consensus design in this issue
Political radicalism	Enforced a developer fund against the majority and accepted losing the ticker; raised the fund from 8 to 32 percent and added 10 percent staking in 2023; moved the fund out of consensus into policy enforced by Avalanche
Adoption	Listed on Binance, Upbit, Bithumb, HTX and CoinEx; one-confirmation deposits at a growing list of exchanges; market cap 0.0094 percent of BTC and about 3 percent of BCH (17 September 2026)
Scalability claims vs measurement	Sub-three-second finality is live; 5 million TPS is on the roadmap; actual throughput is a small fraction of capacity
Decentralization	One client, written by a block reward recipient; about 100 staking nodes; a funding policy the beneficiaries can change
Security model	0.005 percent of Bitcoin’s difficulty plus a stake worth about $2.5 million; no serious attack on the hybrid model yet
Long-run viability	Six years of twice-yearly upgrades funded from the chain; depends on a single client; stigma from the IFP inside BCH and confusion over the name outside it
Speculative context	Upside: instant-finality payments and sponsored-fee tokens, if exchanges and merchants adopt them. Downside: a small share of hashrate, a parent chain thirty times larger, and three other eCashes

Sources

Bitcoin ABC, “BCHA has been rebranded to eCash” (bitcoinabc.org/bcha) and May 2026 upgrade notice; e.cash blog posts “Avalanche Post-Consensus on eCash” (September 2022), “One Month of eCash Staking Rewards” (December 2023), “eCash Year in Review 2023,” “eCash Day 2024,” “Avalanche Pre-Consensus Launches on eCash” (November 2025), “eCash Year in Review 2025,” “eCash Day 2026,” “The Infrastructure Funding Policy” (August 2025), “Bitcoin ABC Rebrands to eCash” (2021) and “Interview with Amaury Sechet, Financial Freedom Fighter”; e.cash/staking; Nicole Grinstead, “Amaury Séchet on Evolution, Governance & Religion” (Medium, 2020); Cointelegraph on the July 2021 rebrand; CoinGecko and CoinMarketCap eCash pages, 17 September 2026; Coin Dance eCash statistics; mempool.space; Decrypt, CoinDesk and Bitcoin.com News on 15 November 2020; Bitcoin Takeover Podcast S15 E28 and S17 E19 (Amaury Séchet), S17 E26 (Calin Culianu, Steve Thurmond and the Bitcoin Cash developers), S17 E39 (Kurt Wuckert Jr), S17 E44 (Marc De Mesel) and S16 E13 (Corbin Fraser).