ECash (XEC) Things You Need To Know Before Investing

Riya KapoorApril 10, 2022

3 minutes read

Table of Contents

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 designed to be used as electronic cash.” ECash strictly aims to be a 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 XEC 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 XEC. 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 XEC, Bitcoin Cash ABC (BCHA). That fork happened on November 15, 2020. Secret then decided to rebrand Bitcoin Cash ABC to establish a new brand identity for XEC, 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.”

The secret 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, XEC’s developers intend to fulfil five core missions:

Ensuring anonymous transactions
Ensuring the immutability of transactions
Guaranteeing that transactions remain almost free
Enforcing globally secure transactions with the 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 XEC to 50 transactions per day for up to 10 billion users.

How Many ECash (XEC) Coins Are There in Circulation?

There are no tokenomics of eCash (XEC), but it follows many of the same rules already established for Bitcoin (BTC). It shares Bitcoin’s supply and distribution model, meaning that every 210,000 blocks, approximately every four years, miner rewards are cut in half. XEC has the same supply cap as Bitcoin of 2.1 quadrillion satoshis. Yet, instead of those 2.1 quadrillion SATS being divided by 100 million to yield 21 million BTC, it was divided by 100, yielding 21 trillion XEC. This is simply because it is easier for users to grasp integers mentally, and this decision aligns with the coin’s goal of mass adoption.

How Is the eCash Network Secured?

In contrast to the Bitcoin Cash ABC (BCHA) network, which is secured using a proof-of-work (PoW) consensus mechanism, the developers of eCash plan to add proof-of-stake (PoS) to speed up transactions. What they term “Avalanche post-consensus” would see enhanced security and fork-free upgrades and allow for advanced opcodes thanks to enhanced script capability. The Avalanche layer will be added on top of the existing PoW to leverage the benefits of both.

XEC is not an ERC-20 token, and it is its blockchain, similar to Bitcoin (BTC).