Satoshi's $84 billion worth Bitcoin just became someone's target

The crypto community is no longer interested in figuring out Satoshi Nakamoto's real identity. Some are directly coming for his dormant Bitcoin.

Paul Sztorc, founder and CEO of LayerTwo Labs and a longtime Bitcoin (BTC) developer, announced on April 24 that he is building a new Bitcoin hard fork, scheduled to activate at block height 964,000, expected sometime in August 2026.

A hard fork is when a blockchain's rules change in a way that is not backwards compatible. 

Everyone on the network either upgrades to the new version or gets left behind on the old one. If the community splits over which path to take, the result is two separate blockchains and two separate coins.

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Who proposed this and why

Sztorc has been working on a concept called Drivechains since 2015, a system that lets developers build separate networks (called sidechains) on top of Bitcoin without changing Bitcoin's core code. 

He formally submitted the idea to the Bitcoin developer community as BIP300 and BIP301 in 2017 and 2019. The proposals never gained enough support to be activated on Bitcoin itself.

So Sztorc is taking a different route. Rather than waiting for Bitcoin's developers to adopt Drivechains, he is forking the network and building the feature into a new chain from day one.

The new coin is called eCash. If you hold Bitcoin at the time of the fork, you will automatically receive an equal amount of eCash, no action required. A holder of 4.19 BTC, for example, will receive 4.19 eCash. From there, holders can sell it, keep it, or ignore it entirely. Their Bitcoin remains untouched either way.

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How the fork will work

The eCash network is built as a near-copy of Bitcoin Core, the software that powers Bitcoin today. It uses the same SHA-256 mining algorithm and will fork from Bitcoin through a one-time difficulty reset to its minimum value. That means mining activity on the new chain will be unusually high and chaotic in the early days before it stabilizes.

The team has committed to keeping eCash's base code compatible with Bitcoin Core going forward, including merging future Bitcoin Core updates. The launch client will be frozen 30 days before the fork date, and several bug bounty contests are planned for the summer to stress-test the code.

The most significant technical departure is the activation of Drivechains. In simple terms, this allows separate networks to be built on top of eCash that can each serve a different purpose, prediction markets, decentralized exchanges, privacy tools — while sharing security with the main chain. Bitcoin miners can mine these secondary networks simultaneously at no extra cost, earning additional revenue.

Seven of these secondary networks are already in development, including Truthcoin (a prediction markets platform), CoinShift (a decentralized exchange), BitAssets (for NFTs and tokenized assets), BitNames (a decentralized identity system), and Photon (a quantum-resistant chain).

How eCash differs from the 2017 Bitcoin Cash fork

The biggest and most well-known Bitcoin fork was Bitcoin Cash (BCH) in August 2017. 

A group of developers and miners disagreed with Bitcoin's approach to scaling and wanted to increase the block size from 1MB to 8MB to handle more transactions. The community split, and Bitcoin Cash was born.

It still exists today, but trades at a tiny fraction of Bitcoin's value. At press time, BCH was trading at roughly $448, compared to Bitcoin at approximately $76,669 — meaning Bitcoin Cash is worth less than 1% of Bitcoin's price, according to CoinGecko.

Sztorc argues the eCash approach is different in several key ways. 

The name contains no reference to "Bitcoin," establishing a distinct brand from the start. Holders are receiving four months of advance notice, compared to the compressed timeline of 2017. The team argues the changes represent a permanent, structural fix to Bitcoin's scalability problems through Drivechains, rather than a temporary block-size increase. A coin-splitter tool will also be released to help users separate their BTC and eCash cleanly.

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How eCash differs from the 2017 BCH fork

The announcement draws a direct comparison to Bitcoin Cash, the 2017 hard fork that remains the most well-known Bitcoin split to date. 

Sztorc argues their approach is different in several key ways:

• The name contains no reference to "Bitcoin," establishing a distinct brand from the start

• Holders are receiving four months of advance notice, compared to the rushed timeline of 2017

• The team argues their changes represent a permanent, structural fix to Bitcoin's scalability problems, rather than a temporary block-size increase

• A coin-splitter tool will be released to help users separate their BTC and eCash cleanly

Related: Trader predicts Satoshi could move Bitcoin in 2026

The controversy: Satoshi's coins

This is where the proposal went from technical to explosive.

Satoshi Nakamoto is believed to hold approximately 1.1 million BTC, worth $84.1 billion in what is known as the "Patoshi pattern" — a cluster of early mining addresses widely attributed to Bitcoin's creator. Those coins have never moved.

In every previous Bitcoin fork — Bitcoin Cash, Bitcoin SV, Bitcoin Gold — Satoshi's equivalent coins on the new chain were left untouched, sitting dormant just as they do on Bitcoin itself. The eCash team is breaking that precedent.

In his April 24 post, Sztorc revealed that the team plans to manually reassign fewer than half of Satoshi's equivalent eCash tokens — not actual BTC — to early investors ahead of the August fork. The idea is to give collaborators and backers a financial stake in the project before launch day.

Sztorc acknowledged the decision would be controversial but argued it was necessary. A "pure fork," he explained, leaves collaborators with no way to get involved ahead of time, turning the project into a "zombie" until launch day, making it harder to ship as a finished product and, ironically, more likely to become centralized.

He added that he mostly avoids discussing the investment opportunity publicly to stay clear of what he called "seedy grifter-style investment-promotion activities," but felt obligated to disclose it for full transparency.

The backlash was immediate

The community response was overwhelmingly negative. Roughly 80% to 85% of replies to Sztorc's announcement on X opposed the proposal.

Kyle Chassé, a crypto entrepreneur, warned: "This is not an upgrade, it rewrites ownership. If it gains traction, it challenges the idea that whoever holds the keys owns the coins. Most likely outcome is another fork, heavy backlash, and no real impact on Bitcoin."

Another crypto trader who goes by the name DBCrypto called it a destruction of Web3: "Seriously messed up because if you can vote to take Satoshi's coins, nobody's coins are safe."

Bitcoin advocate Peter McCormack was blunt: "Taking Satoshi coins is theft and disrespectful."

Josh Ellithorpe, CTO at Pixelated Ink, raised a precedent concern that extended beyond this fork. If reassigning Satoshi's coins on a new chain is acceptable, he argued, the same logic could eventually apply to any dormant wallet. "Now it's Satoshi, but it could be anyone later," he said.

Sztorc's response

A second post from Sztorc appeared to respond directly to the backlash.

He was clear on a key distinction: the team is not taking any of Satoshi's actual BTC. Instead, it is gifting 600,000 eCash tokens to Satoshi's addresses on the new chain — noting this is 600,000 more than Satoshi received from Litecoin, Ethereum, Solana, Tether, or any other major project that emerged after Bitcoin.

BTC balances remain entirely untouched. Moving BTC always requires the original Bitcoin software and the original private key, neither of which the eCash team holds.

On replay protection, Sztorc clarified that moving BTC after the fork will also move the corresponding eCash, but moving eCash — to sell it, for example — will not replay on the Bitcoin network, at least within the team's official software.

"It is fun to virtue signal about property rights, I get it. But be careful who you listen to and who you get your information from — in the heat of the moment, it may not be reliable," Sztorc said.

The naming problem

The controversy does not end with Satoshi's coins. The name itself is a problem.

"eCash" is already an existing cryptocurrency with the ticker XEC. It is a layer-1 digital cash network developed by Bitcoin ABC, created when Amaury Séchet's team split from Bitcoin Cash in November 2020 and rebranded to eCash in July 2021. It currently has a market cap of approximately $139 million and is live on exchanges including Binance, HTX, and MEXC.

Sztorc has responded that "eCash" is a generic term with a long history, citing David Chaum's original digital cash designs from the 1980s and more recent privacy tools like Cashu. The existing eCash community, led by Séchet, has voiced frustration over the overlap.

TheStreet Roundtable reached out to both the eCash team and Sztorc for comments and has not received any responses at the time of publication.

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