Paul Sztorc wants to launch a Bitcoin fork in August 2026 with Drivechains, but the plan to use Satoshi Nakamoto’s coins triggers theft accusations from the community.
Paul Sztorc has proposed a hard fork of the Bitcoin network called eCash, scheduled for August 2026 at block height 964,000. The proposal involves creating a new chain that replicates the entire history of Bitcoin up to the point of separation, with the addition of Drivechains. Every BTC holder at the time of the fork will receive an equivalent amount of eCash tokens.
Sztorc has been working on this architecture since 2015, when he first proposed Drivechains, later formalized as BIP300 and BIP301 in 2017 and 2019 respectively. Drivechains are types of sidechains anchored to the Bitcoin blockchain that can operate with their own rules and features, allowing developers to build new capabilities without requiring the entire network to adopt them. Seven Drivechains are already in development, including a privacy chain modeled on Zcash, a prediction market called Truthcoin, a decentralized exchange called CoinShift, and a quantum-resistant chain called Photon. A coin-splitter tool will also be released to separate BTC from the new eCash tokens.
The most controversial part of the project concerns funding: Sztorc intends to use the bitcoin on addresses attributed to Satoshi Nakamoto on the new eCash chain to attract investors before the launch. Considering that the amount totals 1.1 million bitcoin in wallets that have never moved funds, those coins would appear as an equivalent eCash balance on the new chain. According to the plan, less than half of these equivalent eCash coins would be assigned to investors in the pre-fork phase, although the precise mechanism remains unclear.
A hard fork involves copying the existing blockchain code and launching a separate chain that shares Bitcoin’s entire history up to the split point, then diverging with its own rules, features, and tokens. The most well-known precedent is that of 2017, when the debate over the 1MB block size limit led to the creation of Bitcoin Cash (BCH).
