Ecash (XEC) is a cryptocurrency designed to function as electronic cash. It’s a rebrand of bitcoin cash ABC and was created by a team led by the lead developer of bitcoin cash (BCH), Amaury Séchet.

Sechét launched ecash in 2021 after a November 2020 fork split BCH into two coins: bitcoin cash and bitcoin cash ABC. Bitcoin cash is a fork of bitcoin that’s optimized for payments.

Bitcoin cash ABC was controversial because it diverted 8% of the block rewards from bitcoin cash miners into the hands of its development team, similar to zcash (ZEC). The move was unpopular; some considered it little more than a cash grab.

The fork’s awkward new name sparked a rebrand, so the development team changed its new name from BCHA to ecash (XEC) in July 2021. Bitcoin ABC remains the name of the software used to interact with and maintain the ecash network, and some exchanges still list ecash under the ticker of BCHA rather than XEC.

Since the rebrand, ecash has followed the fate of other altcoins, rising in September and November 2021 (it hit an all-time high of $0.0005926 at a market cap of $6.81 billion on Nov. 10, 2021) before falling shortly thereafter.

The other bitcoin cash fork remains the larger one; it hit its 2021 high of $1,542 at a market capitalization of $8.51 billion.

Of course, both the remaining BCH fork and the rebranded XEC pale in comparison to bitcoin (BTC). When the world’s first cryptocurrency hit an all-time high of $67,566 in November 2021, it did so with a market capitalization of $1.27 trillion. Put another way, when BTC peaked in 2021, its market capitalization was 186 times greater than XEC’s market cap and 149 times larger than BCH’s.

Ecash has a total supply of 21 trillion XEC – a million times greater than bitcoin. Ecash’s developers will not burn any XEC to decrease supply (and increase demand), making its tokenomics similar to bitcoin’s.

Ecash operates on its own blockchain, but a “wrapped” version of the token – a synthetic version of XEC based on another blockchain – is based on the Binance Smart Chain as a BEP-20 token. Wrapped XEC is custodied by crypto exchange Binance.

The eCash blockchain is switching to Avalanche consensus (the same as AVAX). This implements something called post-consensus, a way of processing blocks after they have been produced by miners.

Séchet started bitcoin cash in 2017 by forking it from bitcoin. BCH was further forked into bitcoin SV (Satoshi’s Vision), or BSV, by a team led by self-professed Bitcoin creator Craig Wright. Wright and his team maintained that BSV preserved the original vision of Bitcoin.

The eCash network upgrades twice a year: on May 15th and November 15th. The project has implemented the same Schnorr signatures as Bitcoin’s Taproot upgrade.

An ongoing roadmap outlines plans for a zero-knowledge (ZK) subchain, instant transactions, opt-in private transactions and further plans for scalability.

In March 2022, eCash started “incubating” (rigorously testing) the Avalanche post-consensus integration. After the testing period is complete, eCash will release node software that allows anyone using eCash to use the Avalanche Post-Consensus protocol. In the future, this will be switched on by default.