Bitcoin Hard Fork eCash Plans to Reassign Satoshi Coins

• Long-time Bitcoin developer Paul Sztorc has announced eCash, a Bitcoin hard fork scheduled for August 2026, built around his decade-old Drivechain proposal
• Sztorc plans to reassign fewer than half of Satoshi Nakamoto’s 1.1 million BTC equivalent on the new chain to early investors a move no previous Bitcoin fork has attempted
• Bitcoin is trading at $77,819 at press time, down 0.04% in the last 24 hours, per CoinDesk

Bitcoin developer Paul Sztorc announced on April 24 that he is forking Bitcoin into a new chain called eCash, scheduled to go live at block height 964,000 in August 2026. Every Bitcoin holder receives eCash at a 1:1 ratio at the time of the fork. Hold 4.19 BTC, get 4.19 eCash. Holders can keep, sell, or ignore it entirely. However, the fork itself isn’t the controversy, rather the funding mechanism is.

What Sztorc Is Proposing

Satoshi Nakamoto’s wallets hold approximately 1.1 million Bitcoin, identified through the so-called “patoshi pattern,” which is a mining fingerprint associated with the network’s founder. Those coins have never moved.

When the eCash chain launches, Satoshi’s Bitcoin addresses will have equivalent eCash balances, like every other wallet on the chain. Sztorc intends to manually reassign fewer than half of those eCash-equivalent coins to investors before the fork goes live. This counts as pre-selling a promised credit against a chain that does not yet exist.

Sztorc’s justification is straightforward. According to him, the hard forks face a structural funding problem with no revenue, tokens to sell, or a way to pay developers before launch. And without early investors, the project becomes what he called a “zombie.” Therefore, reassigning Satoshi’s coins is, in his words, “necessary, and in fact, ideal.”

This is the first time any Bitcoin fork has touched Satoshi’s stack. Not Bitcoin Cash in 2017. Not Bitcoin SV. Not Bitcoin Gold. All previous forks left Satoshi’s equivalent coins untouched.

The eCash Case

eCash is built around Sztorc’s BIP300 and BIP301 proposals, first submitted to Bitcoin developers in 2017 and 2019 respectively. Bitcoin Core developers have consistently refused to merge them.

Drivechains are sidechains secured by Bitcoin miners through merged mining. They allow new features such as smart contracts, privacy tools, prediction markets to help operate on separate chains without modifying Bitcoin’s base layer. Miners earn additional revenue from sidechain activity without extra energy costs.

Sztorc has seven Layer 2 networks already in development for the eCash launch. They include Truthcoin (a prediction market), Coinshift (a decentralized exchange), Photon (a quantum-resistant chain) and Bitnames (an identity service).

The technical argument for Drivechains has supporters. The argument for funding them through Satoshi’s coins does not.

What the Community Is Saying

Reaction has been overwhelmingly negative. A sentiment analysis of responses to Sztorc’s X announcement showed approximately 80% to 85% of replies opposed the proposal.

Bitcoin advocate Peter McCormack shared his take on the matter saying, “Taking Satoshi coins is theft and disrespectful.”

Josh Ellithorpe, CTO at Pixelated Ink, raised a precedent concern. If reassigning Satoshi’s coins on a fork is acceptable, the same logic could eventually apply to any dormant wallet. “Now it’s Satoshi, but it could be anyone later,” he said.

Developer Calle, known for the Cashu protocol, rejected the Drivechain proposal on technical grounds. He argues that BIP300 grants miners excessive authority and could allow a hash power majority to misappropriate funds.

The name “eCash” has also drawn criticism. The term is already used by an existing altcoin derived from the Bitcoin Cash fork, creating immediate brand confusion. Sztorc’s choice of name is widely seen as poor judgment at best and deliberately misleading at worst.

The Larger Context

This proposal lands alongside two other active debates about Satoshi’s coins. BIP-361, a quantum resistance proposal co-authored by developer Jameson Lopp, would effectively freeze Satoshi’s 1.1 million BTC permanently under a soft fork which is a move Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson has argued would functionally require a hard fork. Lopp himself has said he hopes the proposal never needs to be adopted.

Both debates point to the same unresolved question in Bitcoin development. Satoshi’s coins are simultaneously Bitcoin’s largest single block of dormant supply and its most politically charged address cluster. In another article we covered the UXLINK protocol hack, in which $11 million was stolen through a deepfake social engineering attack which is a reminder that custody and control of large crypto holdings, even inactive ones, carries persistent risk.

Whether eCash launches as planned in August will depend on whether Sztorc can secure enough investor buy-in to fund development. But, based on the community’s initial response, that is not a given.