Bitcoin’s eCash fork gives eligible holders an equivalent balance of ECX, but questions remain over where they can trade the tokens and what they can do with them.

Somewhere between the Binance hack and the US midterms, Paul Sztorc’s long-awaited Bitcoin fork, known as the eCash network, went live.

On Oct. 29, Sztorc, the founder of LayerTwo Labs and the driving force behind the Bitcoin Drivechain proposals BIP300 and BIP301 , launched a separate Bitcoin fork designed to bring payments, privacy and other applications to a network built from Bitcoin’s code.

“We need to actively sabotage the ‘degrowth’ policies killing Bitcoin,” Sztorc tells Magazine.

The hard fork gives eligible Bitcoin holders an interesting windfall: their equivalent BTC balance in the new chain’s native token, ECX.

So what benefits does eCash bring to developers, and what can Bitcoin HODLers actually do with their new coins?

Developed by Sztorc’s LayerTwo Labs, eCash is a separate hard fork of Bitcoin born out of Sztorc’s frustration with some of the “complacency narratives” and “cult-like toxicity” he believes has been holding Bitcoin back.

Its main innovation is Drivechains, a system that gives developers freedom to build independent sidechains with different features without having to make changes to Bitcoin’s base-layer protocol (or in this case, eCash’s base layer).

Developers can experiment with different applications for payments, privacy, digital assets and prediction markets, and miners can “maximize their revenues” by earning additional transaction fees.

Five sidechains launched alongside eCash’s mainnet: BitNames, BitAssets, Thunder, Truthcoin and zSide, with two more, the quantum-resistant Photon and decentralized exchange CoinShift, still to come.

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