About solofork

An independent solo mining pool for the LayerTwoLabs eCash (ECX) hard fork. Run by a pseudonymous EU operator. Non-custodial by construction, no accounts, 2% coinbase donation fee.

Independent and pseudonymous

solofork is not affiliated with LayerTwoLabs, drivechain.info, or any ECX foundation. The operator is a pseudonymous individual based in the EU. All contact is via [email protected]; there is no company, no team page, no LinkedIn.

Why pseudonymous: the operator has an unrelated day job in the Bitcoin industry and prefers to keep the two identities separate. This does not affect payouts (coinbase pays your address directly — the pool never touches your coins) or transparency (the full stack is open source).

Non-custodial by construction

Solo mining means the coinbase transaction of every block found pays directly to the address you specified as your username. The pool never receives, holds, or forwards your coins. There is no wallet on our side to hack, no signup, no KYC, no withdrawal delay, no minimum payout.

The one exception is the 2% donation output — a second coinbase output that pays the operator. That output pays a well-known address that will be published on this page before Full Release. Miners who want to verify can inspect the coinbase of any block we find; the split is visible on-chain.

How the pool is built

The pool runs on modified builds of open-source Bitcoin infrastructure. The operator has not committed to publishing the modifications. If unmodified upstream stratum code is a hard requirement for you, mine at a pool whose full stack you can audit. If pool payouts landing directly in your coinbase — verifiable on-chain, immediately, with no separate ledger — is proof enough that we are behaving correctly, this pool is for you.

• L1 node: the published ecash-com/bitcoin image (ghcr.io/ecash-com/bitcoin:alphanet), branch alphanet. A Bitcoin Core v31.1 fork maintained by the ECX project. Run unmodified.
• BIP-300/301 enforcer: bip300301_enforcer. Built from source in-house, unmodified. Runs alongside bitcoind, exposes a JSON-RPC that the stratum server uses for block templates.
• Stratum server: Con Kolivas's CKpool, with in-house patches for a configurable donation address, drivechain-fork GBT compatibility, and per-address coinbase-message lookup. These patches are not published.
• Aggregator sidecar: in-house Python 3, one file, no dependencies beyond the standard library plus a BIP-322 signature verifier. Reads CKpool's JSON state, bitcoind RPC, and CKpool's log stream; writes SQLite; emits pre-baked time-series JSON for the frontend.
• Frontend: in-house hand-written HTML, one CSS file, one vanilla-JS live loop. Chart.js is the only third-party library, self-hosted. No bundler, no framework, no analytics, no external CDN fetch.

Nothing on this list is loadbearing on trusting the operator. The block explorer sees every block this pool finds and every coinbase output; the coinbase pays your address directly. If our modifications broke something, your payouts would break — and you would see it before we did.

What we don't endorse

Running the pool is a technical decision, not a political one. Mining eCash does not signal support for every choice the project has made. We mine it because SHA-256d hardware can mine it and because the drivechain experiment is technically interesting. We do not endorse the following:

• Patoshi coin reassignment. The eCash project plans to reassign a large tranche of dormant early-Bitcoin UTXOs (the so-called "Patoshi" coins) to a foundation and to early investors at Full Release. We think this is a bad idea on principle — the whole point of a UTXO set is that the private key holder decides — and we do not think reassignment of unspent coins should ever be normalised. It is the single largest reason to be sceptical of ECX as a store of value.
• Naming collision with XEC. "eCash" is already the trading name of a Bitcoin Cash fork (ticker XEC). Reusing the name for an unrelated Bitcoin fork causes real user confusion, and the confusion serves the reusing project. We use "eCash (ECX)" throughout this site and encourage others to disambiguate the same way, but we would prefer a different name entirely.
• BIP-300 hash-power seizure vector. Drivechain sidechain withdrawals are validated by hash-power-majority votes over long time windows. This is by design, but it means a coalition of miners can, in principle, vote to redirect sidechain funds. There are unresolved arguments about how bad this is in practice; the argument that it is not bad has never fully convinced us. Miners considering ECX as a long-term platform should read the security literature before deploying real capital on drivechain sidechains.

None of the above prevents us running a solo pool. It does mean we will not shill the project, will not link to promotional material, and will not misrepresent the risks in our documentation. Read the /resources page for the reference material we consider most honest about the design choices.

Fees, payouts, and the donation address

The pool takes a 2% donation via a coinbase output, set per-block by CKpool at template time. The remaining 98% of the block subsidy (plus all transaction fees) pays your address. There are no other fees.

Payout timing is immediate on block-find — the coinbase output is yours the moment the block confirms 100 times (standard Bitcoin coinbase maturity). We do not batch, delay, or apply a minimum threshold, because we cannot: the payout is a coinbase output, not a database entry.

The donation address is bc1qzmvfdpk5cmdd8u5k9m6lmjql8r86ujeh0n3hzs during the Alpha and Beta phases. It will be rotated to a new address before Full Release; the new address will be published here and reachable at this URL on the day of the switch.

Contact

• Email: [email protected] — operational questions, firmware compatibility reports, outage reports.
• PGP: on request, replied from the same mailbox.
• Live API: /api/pool.status · /api/network.status · /api/blocks.json. CORS is open; build whatever dashboards you like.

The pool does not have a Telegram channel, Discord server, or Twitter account of its own. If you see one claiming to be solofork, it is not us.