A long-time Bitcoin developer is attempting a bold — and divisive — reset of the protocol.
Paul Sztorc, who has advocated for major architectural changes to Bitcoin since 2015, has proposed a hard fork that would copy Bitcoin’s ledger and launch a separate network called eCash in August 2026. The fork would credit every existing BTC holder with an equivalent amount of eCash (1 BTC → 1 eCash at fork block height 964,000) and ship a “coin-splitter” tool intended to let people cleanly separate their BTC from the new tokens.
What a hard fork means — and why this matters
- A hard fork copies Bitcoin’s history up to a set point and then diverges, producing a new blockchain with its own rules and native token. The best-known example is Bitcoin Cash (BCH), which split off in 2017 after a contentious debate over Bitcoin’s 1MB block size limit.
- Sztorc’s proposal would do the same: carry Bitcoin’s entire transaction history forward to eCash, including balances that have never moved — meaning the eCash ledger would include the roughly 1.1 million BTC associated with Satoshi Nakamoto’s known addresses.
Drivechains: the technical spine of eCash
The new chain would be nearly identical to Bitcoin except for one major addition: Drivechains, a sidechain architecture Sztorc first publicly proposed in 2015 and formalized as BIP300 and BIP301 in 2017 and 2019. Drivechains aim to let developers run multiple sidechains tethered to the Bitcoin base layer, enabling different rules and features without changing Bitcoin itself. Sztorc likens them to service roads beside a highway that let traffic flow differently without altering the main road.
He says seven Drivechains are already in development for eCash, including:
- a privacy chain modeled on Zcash
- a prediction market called Truthcoin
- a decentralized exchange called CoinShift
- a quantum-resistant chain called Photon
(and three others he referenced on social media)
The controversial funding move: Satoshi coins reassigned
The most inflammatory part of Sztorc’s pitch is how he plans to fund and bootstrap early contributors: by assigning a portion of the eCash balances that correspond to Satoshi’s untouched BTC addresses to investors and collaborators before the fork goes live. Because the fork would mirror Bitcoin’s balances, Satoshi-equivalent eCash would exist on the new chain — and Sztorc proposes reallocating some of those units to secure developer participation and momentum ahead of launch.
According to the proposal, fewer than half of the Satoshi-equivalent eCash coins would be pre-assigned to investors today. The exact mechanics remain unclear; because eCash does not yet exist, the arrangement appears to be a pre-commitment or promised credit that would be delivered only if the fork succeeds.
Sztorc’s rationale and counterarguments
Sztorc argues this incentive structure is necessary to prevent eCash from becoming a “zombie project” that stalls or consolidates control in the hands of a small developer clique. Early, tangible tokens for collaborators, he says, will attract work, coordination and momentum to finish the chain before launch.
But the reaction from parts of the Bitcoin and crypto community has been sharply negative:
- “Taking Satoshi coins is theft and disrespectful, and eCash is already used for Lightning payments with Cashu and Fedi. Those are poor choices,” Bitcoin advocate Peter McCormack wrote on social media.
- Josh Ellithorpe, CTO at Pixelated Ink, warned about precedent and security: “eCash, setting the 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,” he said.
Next steps and unanswered questions
The fork is scheduled for Bitcoin block 964,000 in August 2026 if Sztorc and collaborators push ahead. But several key details remain unsettled or opaque: how the pre-assignment mechanism will be implemented, legal and ethical implications of reallocating Satoshi-equivalent coins, and whether enough of the broader ecosystem will support or reject the chain.
If the proposal proceeds, it will test long-standing norms about custody and ownership on forked chains, and whether a community split can be engineered by pre-allocating balances tied to the pseudonymous inventor of Bitcoin. The debate highlights the tension between experimental governance incentives and the social-contract expectations that underpin Bitcoin’s perceived legitimacy.
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