What Is eCash (XEC)?
eCash (XEC) is the rebranded version of Bitcoin Cash ABC (BCHA), itself a fork of Bitcoin (BTC) and Bitcoin Cash (BCH). It calls itself a “cryptocurrency that’s designed to be used as electronic cash.” eCash strictly aims to be a means of transaction used to pay for goods and services. The coin was rebranded on July 1, 2021, and has since tried to distinguish itself from its predecessor. The base units of eCash are called “bits” and replace the unwieldy decimal places of Bitcoin Cash ABC. Instead of sending 0.00001000 BTC, you would send 10 bits with eCash. ECash integrates a proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus layer called “Avalanche,” which is not to be mistaken for the blockchain Avalanche (AVAX). Upon rebranding, eCash announced that it would convert all BCHA coins to XEC at a ratio of one to one million.
The cryptocurrency’s developers have set their sights on three main improvements:
Scaling transaction throughput from 100 transactions per second to more than five million transactions per second
Improving the payment experience by reducing transaction finality time
Extending the protocol and establishing fork-free upgrades
Who Are the Founders of eCash?
eCash (XEC) is led by its lead developer Amaury Sechet, who was the lead developer of Bitcoin Cash (BCH) and forked that blockchain to establish the predecessor of eCash, Bitcoin Cash ABC (BCHA). That fork happened on November 15, 2020. Sechet then decided to rebrand Bitcoin Cash ABC to establish a new brand identity for eCash, explaining that a reduction of decimal places would help with the adoption of the coin:
“No other money has eight decimal places. Why should crypto? Cryptocurrencies with a lower unit price also enjoy higher bull market appreciation. Because the eCash team is incentivized by both tech and price improvement, this improvement was a no-brainer.”
Sechet was highly active in the development of Bitcoin Cash, leading its initial fork away from Bitcoin in August 2017, its continuation after Bitcoin SV (BSV) was forked from it in November 2018, and its most recent fork from Bitcoin Cash in November 2020. Before his involvement in cryptocurrencies, he was a software engineer at Facebook and a lead developer at Stupid D Compiler.
What Makes eCash Unique?
The developers of eCash (XEC) intend the coin to support Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM)-compatibility and to be interoperable with the decentralized finance (DeFi) sector on Ethereum (ETH). For the coin to become successful, eCash’s developers intend to fulfill five core missions:
Ensuring anonymous transactions
Ensuring the immutability of transactions
Guaranteeing that transactions remain almost free
Enforcing globally secure transactions with a finality of fewer than three seconds
Designing the coin’s infrastructure as a public good, funded via its social contract
To achieve this, the developers of eCash have laid out an ambitious roadmap, with plans to have:
Canonical transaction ordering to enable scalable block processing
Schnorr Signatures to enable batched signature validation
Faster block propagation through graphene or other
UTXO commitment with blockchain pruning and faster initial sync
Merklix-Meta Tree to enable scalable block processing
Adaptive block sizes to support market-driven growth to 1TB blocks
These highly ambitious solutions would propel eCash to 50 transactions per user per day for up to 10 billion users.
