Bitcoin Developer Paul Sztorc Plans August Hard Fork Dubbed eCash, With a Plan to Reassign Satoshi Nakamoto’s Coins

Paul Sztorc wants to fork Bitcoin into a new chain called eCash and reassign part of Satoshi Nakamoto’s 1.1 million dormant BTC to early investors — the Bitcoin community is calling it theft.

Long-time Bitcoin developer Paul Sztorc has announced plans to hard fork Bitcoin into a new chain called eCash, set to launch in August at block height 964,000.

Every BTC holder at the time of the fork would automatically receive an equal amount of eCash on the new chain. A coin-splitter tool will be released to help users cleanly separate their holdings. The new chain will run on a near-copy of Bitcoin Core software using the same SHA-256 hashing algorithm, but with a reduced initial mining difficulty and seven layer-2 scaling networks called Drivechains, a technology Sztorc first proposed in 2015 and has been trying to merge into Bitcoin Core ever since.

This story is an excerpt from the Unchained Daily newsletter.

The funding mechanism for eCash, however, has the Bitcoin community up in arms. Sztorc intends to manually reassign “fewer than half” of Satoshi Nakamoto’s estimated 1.1 million BTC, worth nearly $40 billion at current prices, to investors in the new chain before the fork goes live. The goal is to give early contributors a tangible incentive and build momentum before launch, he said.

“This will no doubt be a controversial decision,” Sztorc wrote on X, “but I think it is necessary, and in fact, ideal.”

Podcaster and Bitcoin advocate Peter McCormack called the proposal “theft and disrespectful,” adding that eCash is already a name used in the Lightning‐adjacent payments space. Critic “PakoVM” predicted the project would collapse within two or three years.

Others warned that touching Satoshi’s coins, even on a forked chain, sets a precedent that could be applied to any dormant address in the future. Josh Ellithorpe, chief technology officer at Pixelated Ink, wrote that the move shows the team “can and will steal coins,” adding that “now it’s Satoshi, but it could be anyone later.”

Sztorc has since posted a second version of the proposal that does not involve Satoshi’s coins, though the final structure has not been confirmed. No miners, exchanges, or major ecosystem participants have yet signaled they will support the chain.