Bitcoin Cash ABC (BCHA) is now eCash (XEC)

1 BCHA = 1,000,000 XEC (eCash)

Brief bit of background: During the November 15th, 2020 Bitcoin Cash (BCH) hard fork (at block 661,447) BCHA (or Bitcoin Cash ABC) became it’s own chain.

More about that hard fork can be found at, Hash Watch: The Highly Anticipated Bitcoin Cash Fork Is Now Complete by Jamie Redman.

Bitcoin Cash (BCH) hard forks are more commonly known as scheduled upgrades as they’re planned in advance with the intention of only one chain continuing to be mined and the other being abandoned by everyone. Not always the case though, for instance during the above mentioned hard fork there were two competing fork proposals. Hence, the BCHA chain.

Fast forward to July 1st, 2021: BCHA rebrands and becomes eCash (XEC). More about the rebranding can be found at, eCash: Wealth Redefined by Antony Zegers

What is eCash? I’ve only just begun looking further into eCash (XEC) but I think the following, in my own words, describes it:

• Is eCash a hard fork of BCHA? Answer: No
• Is eCash a soft fork of BCHA? Answer: No
• Is eCash an airdrop, or snapshot, of BCHA? Answer: No
• Developers, and the community of Bitcoin Cash ABC (BCHA), have renamed to eCash (XEC).
• Where’s it renamed? Some exchanges (appears that more and more exchanges are coming onboard with the rebranding), some new wallets and various websites and news outlets.
• By sending BCHA from a BCHA wallet to an eCASH wallet your eCash wallet balance will be 1 million times greater than it was in your BCHA wallet. It’s just how it’s displayed in eCash wallets. I imagine somewhat similar, in a way, to some bitcoin / crypto wallets which support balance display in mBTC (or m[any crypto here]) which is 1/1000th of a coin.
• By sending eCash from an eCash wallet to a BCHA wallet your BCHA wallet balance will be 1 million times less than it was in your eCash wallet.
• eCash supports a new address encoding or format which is also called eCash. You can convert to and from CashAddr (the encoding used by BCHA and BCH) and also legacy addresses. You can convert by using the converter at e.cash/address-converter

Their new website is https://e.cash although the Bitcoinabc.org website itself is still very relevant (software, binaries, downloads, documentations, etc.).

To date there appears to be more than 20 exchanges which support the rebranding. Including my favorite BCH related exchange, CoinEx!

There’s also bigger names, including the well-known and thoroughly popular Binance exchange. An up to date (and growing) list of supporting exchanges can be found at e.cash/get-ecash

Apparently Coinmarketcap supports the rebranding as well:

It appears that the ViaBTC mining pool also supports the name change / rebranding. Their site shows data for both BCHA (they call it BHA) and XEC.

That being said, their mining guide for both BCHA and for XEC leads to the same configuration instructions which are shown as being for XEC (eCash): support.viabtc.com/hc/en-us/articles/900004339303

I might try their configuration (Stratum URLs for mining XEC (eCash)). I use Braiins (BOS) mining firmware which makes it very easy to divide hashrate from a single machine (or multiple machines) and direct it towards different pools and different coins. I might direct a few TH/s to eCash (XEC) on the ViaBTC pool and see how it goes and then do a brief write up on it.

See you in the next article!

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