eCash

What is eCash (XEC)?

eCash, formerly known as Bitcoin Cash ABC, is a cryptocurrency designed to be used as electronic cash. As its previous name implies, eCash has an extremely close relationship with Bitcoin.

Many cryptocurrencies go through a process called a hard fork, which sees the chain split, creating two versions of the original. One is usually recognized as the true version of the original and keeps its name.

eCash is a result of two hard forks of Bitcoin, the first creating Bitcoin Cash, and the second giving rise to Bitcoin Cash ABC.

While it, therefore, shares a kind of ancestry with what we know as Bitcoin today, eCash has differentiated itself markedly from the “OG” in the years since. For one thing, there are a lot more units of eCash going around than there are Bitcoins, and the underlying architecture of the code has changed a lot as well.

Crucially, though, the actual usage of the two cryptocurrencies is very distinct. While many see Bitcoin as an investment asset or purely a store of value today, eCash holds closer to Bitcoin’s founding vision of being an electronic peer-to-peer currency.

What is a Hard Fork?

A hard fork is a change in the protocol of a blockchain network that causes the chain to split into two. This is usually done to upgrade the network but sometimes happens as a result of a community divide.

Bitcoin holders at the time of the Bitcoin Cash hard fork, block 478,558, automatically became holders of the same amount of BCH.

Bitcoin Cash forked in 2018 to create Bitcoin SV, then forked again in 2020 when Bitcoin Cash ABC split away from Bitcoin Cash over centralization concerns. This fork was the birth of eCash.

The second type of fork, the soft fork, is a change to a protocol that doesn’t result in the launch of a new cryptocurrency as it is backward-compatible.

When Was eCash Launched?

When Bitcoin Cash forked on the 15th of November, 2020, eCash was launched under the name Bitcoin Cash ABC.

Along with this fork, Bitcoin Cash ABC was rebranded to eCash and the number of decimal places used by the currency was reduced. This gave rise to the base unit of eCash being called “bits,” where 1 bit was equivalent to 0.000001 BTC.

In effect, this multiplied the supply of eCash by a factor of 1 million, with the total XEC supply going from 21 million (as with Bitcoin) to 21 trillion. eCash performed this change along with the rebrand, converting all existing BCHA coins each to one million XEC.

Who are the Founders of eCash?

eCash is led by developer Amaury Sechet, who was previously the lead developer of Bitcoin Cash.

Sechet was extremely active in the development of Bitcoin Cash, leading its initial fork away from Bitcoin back in 2017. Prior to his work on eCash and Bitcoin Cash, Sechet was a software engineer at Facebook, the company now known as Meta in an effort to hop on the Metaverse bandwagon. Sechet, who styles himself as the “benevolent dictator of Bitcoin ABC,” said in a 2021 AMA that the rebrand of Bitcoin Cash ABC to eCash was necessary. It meant that eCash could “be used everywhere that could replace fiat currency” and was “a term used for years, including by economist Milton Friedman.”

Bitcoin ABC is the team, led by Sechet, that forked Bitcoin Cash from Bitcoin and continues to work on eCash today. The Bitcoin ABC name is also used by the software needed to interact with the eCash network.

How Does eCash Work?

eCash uses cryptography to verify transactions and record them on a public distributed ledger called a blockchain.

Blockchains are made up of blocks that comprise a set of transactions batched together. On top of that, each block has an SHA-256 cryptographic hash of the previous block, going all the way back to the first, or genesis, block.

Because each block has a record of the previous block, blockchains are immutable, or cannot be changed. This is because changing one of the previous blocks would make its cryptographic hash different and therefore make the following blocks invalid.

What Makes eCash Unique?

It could be argued that of all of Bitcoin’s hard forks, eCash has diverged the most.

Rebranding to drop the Bitcoin name was a major step forward in that regard, given that Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin SV, though currently more valuable, often struggle to escape Bitcoin’s shadow.

However, eCash has also made several small but very meaningful changes. For one thing, its supply increased by a factor of a million, which means that users tend to transact in larger numbers of the currency.

While an unfortunate byproduct of questionable economic practices, these large denominations of currency nevertheless tend to be easier for the human mind to make sense of. For example, paying 25,000 units of currency for an item is easier than paying 0.00002500 units of the same currency.

By the same token, eCash has been given a default base unit with two decimal places. This mimics the majority of fiat currencies around the world (although there are exceptions, such as the Omani Rial, which divides into 1000 baisa).

This makes eCash easier to transact with compared to the likes of Bitcoin, which divide to eight decimal places and make small or micro-transactions very difficult.

Behind the scenes, eCash also does a lot of things differently. Hard forks, which led to eCash’s creation in the first place, are no longer needed for upgrades thanks to the network being made extensible.

eCash also has elements of privacy built in via CashFusion, which offers anonymity comparable to that of the top privacy coins. At the same time, it maintains an auditable supply cap which can be activated and deactivated as required by users.

How is the eCash Network Secured?

eCash is soon to be secured by Avalanche, a consensus mechanism that enables instant transactions, enhanced security, and fork-free upgrades along with decentralized governance. Avalanche can also achieve high throughput and scalability without significant energy usage.

Avalanche also secures the Avalanche (AVAX) blockchain, but the eCash chain has no relationship with the Avalanche blockchain itself—it simply uses the technology of the same name.

As a matter of fact, the eCash website underlines that the Bitcoin ABC team is building the eCash’s Avalanche consensus code completely independently. This puts eCash in a tech leadership role without needing to rely on third-party innovation.

Avalanche, created by a pseudonymous entity called Team Rocket, introduces a family of leaderless Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT) protocols that provide a strong probabilistic safety guarantee in the presence of adversaries.

In simpler terms, BFT blockchains are resilient and truthful despite the possibility of a number of nodes on the network not behaving according to the protocol.

That said, eCash doesn’t solely rely on Avalanche. It is often considered a hybrid cryptocurrency when it comes to consensus because XEC is also mined. eCash remains a proof-of-work blockchain at its core, adopting Avalanche proof-of-stake for pre- and post-consensus.

What is the Use of XEC?

XEC is primarily used as a form of electronic cash, just as Bitcoin was intended to be by its founder, Satoshi Nakamoto.

In this respect, XEC is an extremely simple cryptocurrency. However, the eCash network can do a lot more. Alongside allowing eCash transactions at scale and with fast finality, eCash also allows users to create tokens that anyone can use and trade. The creation of tokens requires just a single eCash transaction.

Staking is another use-case granted to XEC thanks to the adoption of Avalanche technology. The Bitcoin ABC team views staking as a critical part of eCash governance and user incentivization.

Who Controls eCash?

ECash is developed by the Bitcoin ABC team and governed by an entity called the Global Network Council (GNC).

The GNC directs protocol revenue to be reinvested back into the eCash ecosystem to fund key infrastructure and ecosystem growth initiatives via approving funding proposals.

According to the GNC’s webpage, it is a group of proven eCash stakeholders that consists of individuals and corporations responsible for reviewing, providing feedback on, and having a final say on the approval of funding proposals.

Funding proposals can be created and emailed to the GNC, which then evaluates the proposal for return on investment (ROI) and practicality. Once a decision is reached, the GNC informs the author of the outcome and what the next steps are.

How Much XEC Is In Circulation?

eCash has a fixed total supply of 21 trillion XEC and over 19.15 trillion XEC are already in circulation.

The yearly XEC inflation rate currently sits at 1.72%, but thanks to eCash’s halving schedule, that figure will reduce to 0.83% in the future and continue to deflate.

What is Halving?

Halving refers to the reduction of block rewards paid to miners upon the successful creation of a new block in the blockchain.

These halvings bring an element of perfect transparency to the supply of cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and eCash, allowing metrics to be predicted far into the future.

The eCash supply webpage shows what the current inflation rate is and what effect the next halving will have.

How Do You Buy XEC?

eCash is available on many major exchanges, and it’s easy to buy on many of those using stablecoins like USDT. However, it’s also possible to buy eCash with fiat currencies like the U.S. dollar or the Korean won, depending on which exchange you use.

eCash was intended to be a form of peer-to-peer electronic money, though, so you can definitely buy it on P2P markets as well.

Is It Possible to Buy XEC Instantly?

eCash is an extremely fast payment system, with Avalanche helping it toward completing transactions in just three seconds. This makes it instant for all intents and purposes and puts it right up there among the top blockchains for speed.

Buying eCash on an exchange may be slower in terms of actually taking custody of your XEC, however.

First, you’ll have to use the exchange platform to swap, trade, or convert another asset into XEC. This step doesn’t take long, and a market order should fill fast since eCast liquidity on major exchanges tends to be very good.

Then, you’ll have to withdraw your XEC from your trading account to your own wallet. This might take a while since many exchanges need to complete KYC (Know Your Customer) and AML (Anti-Money Laundering) procedures on top of their own internal controls before green-lighting your withdrawal.

How Do You Store XEC?

You could just keep your eCash on an exchange, and that’s a viable option if you’re just looking to eventually make a profit on your XEC. However, this approach depends very much on the stability of the platform.

As recent events have shown, even the most high-profile centralized platforms may not be the best places to store your crypto. 2022 has seen the bankruptcies of both Celcius and Voyager, and the shadow of Mt. Gox still looms.

So, if you’d like to take custody of your coins, there are two types of wallets you can choose:

• Cold wallets. Referring to "cold storage," these wallets keep private keys offline and thus safely out of the reach of hackers. These can come in several forms, from devices not connected to the internet to a paper copy of the private key.
• Hot wallets. Unlike cold wallets, these are connected to the internet. They can come in the form of full clients that download a copy of the blockchain, light clients that interact with full nodes, or online/web wallets that store credentials with the online wallet provider rather than the user’s hardware.

You can visit the eCash website and take a look at a list of their official wallets, which includes the likes of Electrum ABC and Cashtab.

eCash Energy Consumption

eCash aims to create money that is usable by everyone in the world. For this reason, eCash must be set against global central banks and the financial system in general when analyzing its energy usage.

And in this regard, it’s hard to argue that eCash’s consumption is anything more than insignificant. While the eCash blockchain does use proof-of-work consensus at its core like Bitcoin does, certain protocol changes have made it more efficient in processing transactions.

Furthermore, the continued integration of the Avalanche protocol continues to tighten up eCash’s technology, making it increasingly more performative and efficient. In contrast are the gargantuan infrastructure demands of actual fiat currencies, including printing, along with massive storage and logistics requirements.

Is XEC a Good Investment?

eCash attempts to retain a lot of Bitcoin’s qualities, including its capped maximum supply and deflationary halving mechanism. Given these qualities, eCash can make a case for being considered a solid store of value similar to Bitcoin.

The eCash team is ambitious, however. Not content with just providing an easy-to-use form of electronic cash, the protocol continues to be developed technically with the addition of the Avalanche protocol.

Included on the eCash roadmap are several items which, if realized, could make eCash a very attractive proposition:

• Achieving “mankind scale” with mass parallelization and market-driven block size growth to 1 TB, scaling from 100 transactions per second to 5 million transactions per second.
• Bulletproof privacy via zero-knowledge subchain, low fees, and fast transactions in perpetuity.
• Ethereum Virtual Machine subchain to enable smart contracts and building an ecosystem of decentralized applications (dApps).

Nonetheless, only time will tell whether the Bitcoin ABC team can truly deliver on these lofty promises.