eCash: the fork with a 1:1 airdrop that excludes 6% of Bitcoin

1,208,994 Bitcoin—6.02% of all coins mined as of August 16, 2026—are deposited in exchange-traded funds whose filings with the U.S. regulator promise to abandon any currency received via a fork or airdrop, "permanently and irrevocably" in the phrasing of IBIT, the largest spot Bitcoin ETF. The eCash (ECX) hard fork promises to credit one new unit for every Bitcoin in existence at the time of the split, and the headline writes itself: free money for every BTC holder. However, the arithmetic tells a different story at both ends. At the top, the design reserves 600,000 units for addresses attributed to Satoshi Nakamoto and redirects another 500,000 to those financing the project—a premine (allocation created before the public launch) of 2.49% of the new chain's total supply. At the bottom, just over 6% of mined Bitcoin lives in vehicles that have already waived their rights in writing, one by one, before the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. This article verifies issuer by issuer who has waived and who remains silent, recalculates the fork schedule—which has changed three times and no longer occurs at block 964,000—based on the actual chain pace, and explains exactly what it means that the project's replay protection is only half-implemented.

Why does the eCash "one-to-one" distribution deliver half a million units to funders?

The promise of eCash (ECX) is a copy of the Bitcoin ledger: every address with a balance at the block of separation appears with the same balance on the new chain, without registration, claims, or forms. The integration guide maintained by the project on GitHub, updated on August 11, 2026, states it in one line: "every BTC address receives ECX 1:1 at the fork block; the BTC itself remains intact."

The exception lies in the coins from the foundational era. According to Paul Sztorc, the developer leading the fork, in interviews on April 27 and 28, 2026, reported by The Block and CoinDesk, of the approximately 1.1 million BTC that the Patoshi pattern (the trail left by foundational mining in blocks attributed to its creator) assigns to Satoshi Nakamoto, the associated addresses would receive 600,000 eCash units, while the remaining 500,000 would go toward seeding the ecosystem and early project investors. His literal phrasing was: "We don't take any of Satoshi's BTC. We give Satoshi 600,000 eCash... BTC balances remain untouched by eCash."

Stated as a proportion: the nominal issued supply of Bitcoin at block 973,728—the block set by the project as of August 16, 2026, for the definitive fork—will be 20,105,403 BTC. The 500,000 redirected units are equivalent to 2.49% of the new chain's total supply, and the total of 1,100,000 affected coins represents 5.47%. A 2.49% allocation to funders before launch is a premine in the strictest sense of the term, and it arrives branded with Satoshi's name because the gap it fills comes from the foundational addresses.

Does the eCash fork steal Satoshi's Bitcoin or not touch a single satoshi?

Some coverage claims the fork "reassigns Satoshi's coins," while others say it "doesn't even touch them." Both misdescribe the same mechanism, and the published code allows it to be settled in a single paragraph.

What is reassigned is the eCash that would have belonged to those addresses on the new chain. Not a single Bitcoin changes hands or moves on the Bitcoin chain, because the Bitcoin chain is unaware the fork exists. The project documentation describes the mechanism with unusual precision: a set of hand-coded "repurpose" transactions are declared valid without a signature, bypassing script verification for those specific identifiers via the setRepurposeTx function in the src/repo_txns.h file. The drynet4 testnet practices this with 220 identifiers, expanded from 122 in the previous round. At 50 BTC per coinbase transaction (the one creating new coins in each block) during that era, those 220 identifiers total about 11,000 BTC—around 1% of the million-plus attributed to Patoshi—meaning the final list for the mainnet remains unpublished as of August 16, 2026.

The distinction regarding the debate we previously covered in the quantum threat to dormant coins is exact and should not be confused. In that case, the discussion involves redistributing coins that no one can sign because the cryptography protecting them will have failed, with the argument being that the balance would otherwise be at the mercy of the first person to break the key. Here, the coins remain signable by whoever holds the keys, and the reassignment is not executed on Bitcoin but in the consensus code of a different chain via a whitelist. Fidelity Digital Assets publicly raised the governance question this opens from its institutional account: whether any proposal should have the power to reassign, withdraw, or otherwise alter the ownership of coins (April 27, 2026).

How much Bitcoin is held by those who have already waived eCash in writing?

The actual distribution of a fork like eCash (ECX) is determined by the policy of whoever holds the keys on behalf of another. For spot exchange-traded funds, this policy is written, public, and verifiable document by document.

The current prospectus for IBIT, the largest of them all, contains the full formula: "with respect to a fork, an airdrop or a similar event, the Sponsor will cause the Trust to permanently and irrevocably abandon the incidental rights and the derivative digital asset, and none of them will be taken into account for purposes of determining the Trust’s net asset value." To change this position, the listing market would need to file an application with the SEC to modify its listing rules. The waiver is a registered commitment whose reversal requires that formal process, and no one has initiated it.

Tracing this clause through the EDGAR full-text search, issuer by issuer and using both variants of the formula—with and without "permanently"—reveals the following snapshot. Holdings are those published by each product as of August 13 and 14, 2026; IBIT's figure comes from its own holdings file, showing 747,361.25670 BTC as of August 13. The codes in the third column refer to SEC document types: 10-K (annual report), 10-Q (quarterly), 8-K (current report), and S-1 (registration statement).

The 1,208,994 BTC with a documented waiver in a 2026 filing represent 6.02% of the 20,070,871 Bitcoin mined as of August 16, 2026. The remaining 10,987 BTC in the table belong to two products, BRRR and BTCO, where full-text searches did not return the clause in any document from this year; an equivalent unpublished policy may exist, and this silence is recorded as data alongside the eleven documented waivers.

Two nuances widen the gap. First: the language of the waiver was not drafted by the issuers on their own initiative. In a comment letter dated January 5, 2024, the Crypto Assets Office of the SEC's Division of Corporation Finance specifically asked IBIT to clarify in its prospectus that in the event of any fork or airdrop, the sponsor would irrevocably abandon those rights; the response from the law firm Clifford Chance on January 8 incorporated the text. Products approved on January 10 have carried the clause since day one of trading. Second: IBIT's own prospectus states that its Bitcoin custodian does not support "airdrops, metacoins, colored coins, sidechains or other derivative, enhanced or forked protocols, tokens or coins" unless there is a written public statement to the contrary, and that its additional custodian may temporarily suspend service during a fork and decide at its sole discretion which branch to support. The waiver is stacked in two layers: the issuer's and the custodian's that holds the keys.

This is the same argument that underpins what is bought and what is surrendered when choosing an ETF over the asset, and the reason why the volume of Bitcoin custodied on behalf of third parties matters more than its percentage of the price. Only those who control their keys are in a position to decide, which is the core argument for self-custody applied, for once, to an event with a fixed date.

When does the eCash fork occur if a block-height event has no date?

The eCash schedule has changed three times in four months, and this instability is a property of the format, not a mistake. A fork set at a block height has no date: it has an estimate that is recalculated every time the hashrate shifts. The conversion from height to time depends on an average—a ten-minute target, readjusted every 2,016 blocks—that is only known after the fact.

The original announcement in late April 2026 placed the split at block 964,000. On August 7, the project announced a three-phase deployment reorganization, and the official site as of August 16, 2026, declares the final launch at block 973,728, "around October 31, 2026," a date chosen to coincide with the 18th anniversary of the publication of the Bitcoin whitepaper. The integration guide, updated on August 11, maintains block 963,648 as the fork point with a target of August 22 at 15:00 UTC, which is the first of the three phases.

With the chain tip at block 962,687 on August 16, 2026, at 06:37 UTC and a measured pace of 10.13 minutes per block over the last 1,008 blocks, the three heights fall as follows:

The row that still circulates the most is the last one, and its discrepancy is the largest of the four: reaching block 964,000 by August 21 at 15:00 UTC would require 5.87-minute blocks sustained for five days, 41.3% below the protocol target. The three current phases hold up much better—the deviation ranges from ten hours in the alpha to less than two days in the definitive—because the project recalculated after the chain demonstrated its pace. Any of the three will move again if the hashrate does, in either direction.

It is also worth not confusing products: another currency called eCash (XEC) has existed since 2021, a rebranding of Bitcoin Cash ABC with no relation to the ECX fork in this article.

What does it mean that eCash replay protection is "only partially" implemented?

Headlines repeat that the fork arrives "without replay protection." The precise formulation was published by Sergio Demian Lerner, co-founder of Rootstock Labs, on May 8, 2026, in Forkdropping: Why the eCash Chain Harms the Bitcoin Ecosystem: "replay protection for eCash transactions is only partially implemented (it does not clearly separate transaction signature domains)." He adds the detail that explains it: the project protects eCash transactions, not Bitcoin transactions.

The project's own documentation confirms the diagnosis and provides the mechanism. The protection consists of setting nLockTime = 499999999 in eCash transactions: nodes on the new chain treat it as final, while Bitcoin Core reads that value as a block height roughly 500 million blocks in the future and rejects the transaction for not being final. Three properties make this "half-protection." It is optional: any transaction with another value remains valid on both chains. It is unidirectional: it protects the eCash side from Bitcoin, and there is no equivalent marker that makes a Bitcoin transaction invalid on eCash. And the guide itself admits the magnitude of the problem in one sentence: even after the split, "99% of new transactions will be replayable."

Lerner coined the term forkdrop as opposed to airdrop for this, with an operational definition that serves as a test: Bitcoin transactions are valid on both chains until an eCash transaction breaks that entanglement. Translated into practical consequences, a user operating normally on Bitcoin after the fork could lose their eCash without realizing it, and an exchange sweeping eCash deposits without having first separated its coins could see that sweep replicated on Bitcoin, moving BTC that its accounting had not authorized. The procedure the project recommends to platforms reverses the order for that reason:

1. Freeze withdrawals before the separation block.
2. Separate coins on the eCash side first.
3. Wait for deep confirmation of that separation.
4. Only then resume Bitcoin operations.

This is where the episode connects with the month's other fork. BIP-110 also lacked replay protection, and it stalled at two blocks before the risk could materialize. Two separation attempts in three weeks, and neither fully resolves a problem for which a published technique has existed since 2017: the SIGHASH_FORKID mechanism for signature domain separation that Bitcoin Cash did implement.

Lerner's analysis also lists three costs to the network: a budgetary one (eCash uses the same SHA-256 without merged mining, so it competes for the hashrate that funds Bitcoin's security), a stability one (this competition produces oscillations in miner allocation that can affect both networks), and a distributive one, which this article quantifies: institutional custody procedures make it difficult for a custodian to participate, leaving those who hold Bitcoin through a third party at a disadvantage. Added to this is a design parameter the project documents bluntly: difficulty resets to the minimum at the fork block and the chain starts as mineable from a CPU—drynet4 starts with a difficulty of about 16,000 compared to the 127.5 trillion of the mainnet on August 16, 2026—so its own guide recommends exchanges require "dozens" of confirmations instead of the usual three to six while that period lasts.

What should those planning to claim eCash check, and how is what they receive taxed?

There is an important difference compared to the airdrops of recent years: there is no eligibility farming or anti-Sybil filter here. It is a passive snapshot of the ledger, without prior claims or registration, so the characteristic scam signals of a claim are different, and the loss vector is operational.

The risk was formulated by the two technicians who audited it. Dan Held, a veteran Bitcoin investor and educator, noted that the reassignment of Satoshi's coins works as shock marketing and that the lack of replay protection makes the exchange quite dangerous; the nuance is that eCash replay protection exists halfway, and "halfway" in signature domain separation behaves like "none" for someone signing unknowingly. Lerner pointed to the other end of the custody chain: claiming requires moving funds out of cold storage and interacting with unknown software, which is the exact pattern that empties wallets. This is the same reputational damage mechanism we analyzed in the reassessment of trust in custody after the Coldcard incident: trust in the procedure breaks first, before the coins do.

The guideline that can be given without leaving technical ground is one of hygiene:

• Know which category your coins are in before the corresponding height: ETF with a registered waiver, custodian without a published policy, or self-custody.
• Consult the provider's policy, and note if they do not publish one.
• Do not move anything until there is verified support in the software you use.
• Apply the same scrutiny of domains, signatures, and permissions we covered in the anti-scam claims checklist, because an event with this media coverage attracts site and wallet imitations with punctuality.

On the fiscal front, IBIT's own prospectus summarizes U.S. doctrine: the tax agency has held that a hard fork generating new units of a crypto-asset is a taxable event resulting in ordinary income. Treatment varies greatly by jurisdiction—from taxation at the time of receipt to taxation only upon sale, and even 0% in places like the UAE or Singapore—so country-specific details are in the crypto tax guide. Receiving a fork token without having requested it can generate reporting obligations in several countries, and that cost exists regardless of whether the token ends up being worth anything.

What remains if the eCash fork is delayed again or fails to occur?

The most cited precedent suggests moderate expectations. When Bitcoin Cash split in two on November 15, 2018, the undivided currency had closed the previous day at $425.01; on November 15, BCH was trading around $289 and the newly created BSV around $96.50. The two halves together were worth $385.50, 9.3% less than the whole from the day before. A one-to-one distribution creates units; it does not create value by itself, and it distributes it unequally depending on where the coins were deposited.

Regarding the underlying motive, the most economical reading is provided by the project's own FAQ: the goal is to activate drivechains—the BIP-300 and BIP-301 proposals, with seven sidechains planned at launch—which Sztorc has proposed since 2015 without Bitcoin Core adopting them, to the point that the team states they would abandon the project if Bitcoin activated them on its own. A hard fork is what remains when eleven years of proposals fail to produce consensus, the same outcome by bifurcation that BIP-110 tested this same month from the opposite side.

The eCash fork may move again. It has already done so three times, it is announced by a team with no known mining backing, and it starts with difficulty at the minimum. What survives any outcome are the facts verified on August 16, 2026: just over 6% of mined Bitcoin is committed in writing to the SEC to never collect this distribution, the "one-to-one" reserves 2.49% of the new supply for funders via a still-unpublished whitelist, replay protection will remain optional and unidirectional—with 99% of new transactions replayable, according to the guide itself—and the date will remain an estimate that is redone with the hashrate, as proven by three calendars in four months.

The fork does not distribute based on who has Bitcoin. It distributes based on who has the keys, and that distinction has been abstract for years in self-custody articles. This August, it has a block height, a prospectus clause, and a percentage.

Sources and links: eCash — official site, mainnet block ~973,728 · ecash-com/fast-facts — integration guide, updated Aug 11, 2026 · drivechain.info/dev.txt — project parameters file · SEC/EDGAR — iShares Bitcoin Trust prospectus (POS AM), forked assets waiver clause · SEC/EDGAR — response to Crypto Assets Office comment letter (Jan 8, 2024) · iShares — IBIT holdings file (Aug 13, 2026) · Bitbo — Bitcoin holdings of U.S. spot ETFs (Aug 14, 2026) · Sergio Demian Lerner (Rootstock Labs) — Forkdropping (May 8, 2026) · The Block — 600,000/500,000 distribution and Sztorc statements (Apr 27, 2026) · Fidelity Digital Assets — the question on ownership reassignment (Apr 27, 2026) · CoinDesk — developer warnings on the exchange (May 2, 2026) · Bitcoin.com News — three-phase reorganization (Aug 8, 2026) · BCH and BSV prices at the Nov 15, 2018 split. Chain tip, pace per block, and hourly estimates: proprietary calculation based on the frozen extraction of August 16, 2026, at 06:37 UTC. Mined supply: 20,070,871 BTC according to the blockchain.info public node on August 16, 2026.