- An eCash test network called Alpha began producing blocks from height 963,648 on 23 August. It was a rehearsal, not the split itself.
- The project’s roadmap now puts a 1:1 allocation of a new asset, ECX, to bitcoin holders at a mainnet launch around bitcoin block 973,728, roughly 31 October.
- Nothing about anyone’s bitcoin changed in August, and nothing needs claiming. Any page asking for a to release ECX is a theft, not a claim.
Some time around the end of October, if a roadmap holds, every bitcoin address is meant to be matched by a balance of a new asset called ECX. Holders would not have to do anything to receive it. That last part is the bit criminals build businesses on.
When people hear they are owed a new coin, they go looking for somewhere to collect it, and the search results are where the losses happen. The claim page is the scam. A does not require you to log in anywhere, hand over a recovery phrase, or approve anything with your wallet, and the correct response to news like this is to leave your coins exactly where they are and wait to see whether a platform you already use decides to support the new asset.
What a fork actually is
Bitcoin is a shared record of who owns what, kept in identical copies by thousands of computers running compatible software. Those computers agree on a set of rules: how big a block can be, what counts as a valid transaction, how new coins are issued. Agreement is the whole product.
A fork happens when a group decides to run different rules. From an agreed block onwards, their software accepts blocks that the original network rejects, and the single chain becomes two. Everything before the split point is shared history, which means both chains contain the same list of balances up to that moment. After it, they go their separate ways and never speak again.
This has happened before at scale. In August 2017 a faction that wanted bigger blocks split off from bitcoin and created Bitcoin Cash. Everyone holding bitcoin at the split height ended up with a matching quantity of the new coin, because the new chain inherited the old ledger. eCash itself descends from that lineage: it is a later fork of Bitcoin Cash, now proposing a chain of its own that would credit bitcoin holders directly.
Why a balance appears without anyone doing anything
What you own in bitcoin is a , a secret number that proves coins are yours and authorises moving them. The key is not registered anywhere. It works on any chain that recognises the same address format and inherited the same ledger.
So when a fork copies bitcoin’s balances, the same key that controls your bitcoin also controls the matching balance on the new chain. There is nothing to claim in the sense of applying for something. The entitlement already sits there. What is genuinely awkward is turning it into money: you either wait for an exchange to credit the new asset to customers and let you sell it, or you move a key into software that supports the new chain, which is fiddly and carries real risk of exposing that key to a program you have no reason to trust. Our self-custody guide covers why moving keys around is the moment most things go wrong.
Why a 1:1 allocation is not free money
A fork can hand out a balance to millions of addresses. It cannot hand out demand. The new asset is worth whatever people will pay for it, which for most bitcoin forks since 2017 has settled somewhere between very little and nothing. Bitcoin Cash retained a market. Bitcoin Gold, Bitcoin Diamond and a long tail of others did not hold up, and several were quietly delisted.
There is also a practical gap between holding something and selling it. Exchanges are not obliged to support a fork, and most do not. If none of the platforms a UK reader uses lists ECX, the balance stays theoretical. The eCash project has published a roadmap; it has not published a list of exchanges that have agreed to credit anything.
What the 23 August test showed
According to CryptoSlate, whose write-up is the only account of this we have been able to read, the eCash Alpha explorer showed a block at height 963,648 and the chain advancing through at least 963,650. It also flagged a stale competing block at that opening height, meaning two versions of the same block briefly existed and one was discarded.
Bitcoin’s own record, separately, resolved block 963,648 to hash 00000000000000000001769d9a327f5b455aa8a2dd407b1b63040d2a9f832d32, timestamped 01:48:47 on 23 August. The two chains ran alongside each other. Bitcoin ownership did not change, the practice on the Alpha chain are not the permanent ECX, and exchange notices did not show any general suspension of bitcoin services.
Our inference, clearly labelled as inference: a rehearsal network that produces a competing stale block at its very first height is early-stage engineering rather than infrastructure ready to carry value. That is not a criticism of a test chain, which is what test chains are for. It is a reason to treat the October date as a plan rather than a fixture.
The claim-page pattern, and what it looks like
Every well-publicised fork or is followed within days by sites offering to help you collect it. The pattern is consistent enough to describe in advance.
The crude version asks for your seed phrase, the twelve or twenty-four words that reconstruct your private key, framed as verification of eligibility. Anyone who types those words into a website has given away every coin the wallet controls, on every chain, permanently. There is no legitimate reason for any site, wallet, exchange or support agent to ask for them.
The subtler version asks you to connect a wallet and sign a message to “prove” you held bitcoin at the fork height. A signature can be an approval that lets a contract move your assets later, and most people cannot read what they are signing. Alongside both, expect fake support accounts replying to anyone asking questions publicly, sponsored search results above the real project, and app-store listings imitating known wallets.
A fork requires none of this. If ECX is ever credited to you, it will happen because an exchange you already have an account with decided to support it and told you so in its own app or on its own website.
What the roadmap leaves open
The permanent fork has not happened, and by CryptoSlate’s account the schedule has already shifted once, with the allocation now attached to a mainnet launch rather than the August event. Block heights are estimates in any case: bitcoin blocks average around ten minutes but arrive irregularly, so a target of block 973,728 lands on 31 October give or take days.
We could not find a primary announcement from the project or any on-record statement from an exchange about ECX, so everything above the technical detail rests on a single secondary write-up. Whether will support the new chain, whether it will include protection against transactions being replayed across both chains, and whether any major venue will credit the asset are all unanswered in the material available.
What to watch
Check whether the date moves again. A roadmap that has already slipped once can slip twice, and “the fork is next week” headlines will keep appearing either way.
Then watch the exchanges rather than the project. A notice from a platform you actually use, published by that platform, is the only signal that turns this from an engineering story into something that touches your balance. If one does credit ECX and you sell it, the proceeds are a disposal like any other, so it is worth understanding how HMRC treats crypto before you do anything: our UK crypto tax guide is the place to start.
Until then, the useful action is no action. Details of the project are on eCash’s own site, and everywhere else offering to help you claim something should be treated as hostile.