Solo mining for the eCash hard fork
An independent solo mining pool for the LayerTwoLabs eCash chain — a planned Bitcoin hard fork activating drivechain rules at block 964,000.
Status
Testnet: live on the LayerTwoLabs signet network. End-to-end stratum + GBT + share submission verified. Blocks found here are rejected by signet's signing-key requirement (by design); use this endpoint only to validate that your mining stack speaks our pool correctly.
Forknet (drivechain testnet): currently unavailable upstream (PR #21 pending in L2L signet-server). Pool is configured and ready; will be reachable once L2L restores the peer.
Mainnet: activates alongside the eCash hard fork — scheduled for August 2026 at Bitcoin block 964,000. Pool will switch over within minutes of fork height.
Mine
URL: stratum+tcp://test-stratum.solofork.com:3333
Username: <your eCash address>
Password: xSHA-256d. CKpool solo mode — block reward goes directly to your address via coinbase, no custody. Pool fee is a 2% coinbase output to the operator (rises to 5% with a custom-tag tier in v2).
What is the eCash fork?
"eCash" here refers to Paul Sztorc / LayerTwoLabs's planned Bitcoin hard fork — distinct from XEC, the chain that emerged from the Bitcoin Cash split. This fork activates BIP 300/301 (Drivechains) on a chain that diverges from Bitcoin at block 964,000, restarts at minimum difficulty, and runs as the foundation for several merge-mined L2 sidechains (Thunder, Truthcoin, BitNames, BitAssets, CoinShift, Photon, ZSide).
The project is controversial: a portion of dormant "Patoshi" coins is planned to be reassigned to early investors, the name collides with the existing XEC chain, and BIP 300 has unresolved security concerns about hash-power-majority L2 fund seizure. We don't endorse the project — we mine it. You should form your own view before participating; resources below.
The bonanza window is short — be online at fork minute
The fork starts at minimum difficulty (1.0). Bitcoin's standard difficulty adjustment retargets every 2,016 blocks with a hard ±4× cap per epoch. Even if every epoch is mined instantly, diff goes 1 → 4 → 16 → 64 → 256 — not a single jump to equilibrium. To reach Bitcoin-level network difficulty you'd need roughly 22 successive epochs.
Concretely: with meaningful global hashrate arriving at fork minute, the first epoch finishes in seconds to minutes. The "bonanza" — diff well below where it would normally sit — realistically lasts hours to a couple of days, not "the first 2,016 blocks." Many epochs early on, then ramps toward 10-minute blocks.
Practical implications for miners:
- Be connected at fork minute. Five minutes late means missing most of the window.
- Expect heavy orphan rates during the rapid first epochs — multiple simultaneous block solutions, frequent reorgs. Coinbase outputs that never make the canonical chain are a normal artifact of mining at diff 1.
- Firmware matters. See our writeup on the BraiinsOS panic at low network difficulty — bosminer crashes precisely during the bonanza window. Use cgminer, vnish, or stock Antminer firmware for the first 24 hours.
Resources
- eCash.com — project landing
- LayerTwoLabs — the company
- drivechain.info — Drivechain technology overview
- drivechain.info/dev.txt — current developer reference
- LayerTwo-Labs on GitHub — official repos (bitcoin-patched, bip300301_enforcer, sidechains)
- releases.drivechain.info — prebuilt binaries
About this pool
Operated independently from the Czech Republic. Open-source patches against Con Kolivas's CKpool for configurable donation address and signet GBT compatibility. Source repo is private during pre-launch; will be public before mainnet activation.
Contact: [email protected]
Live API: api.solofork.com/pool/pool.status