Why developers are warning against Paul Sztorc’s eCash fork

Paul Sztorc’s proposed eCash fork has been framed as a battle over Bitcoin’s principles. But among developers and infrastructure builders, a different interpretation is taking hold.

This isn’t really a Bitcoin fork, they argue. It’s an airdrop — and a potentially hazardous one.

“I’m firmly against Paul’s fork, but not because it represents a ‘hostile Bitcoin hard fork,’ as some claim,” said Sergio Lerner, co-founder of Rootstock Labs, told CoinDesk in an email. “eCash is a new blockchain…It is not directly taking anything away from bitcoin holders.”

That distinction cuts through much of the early backlash. Unlike past splits that attempted to carry the Bitcoin name or compete for hashpower, eCash is structurally closer to a new token being airdropped to existing bitcoin holders.

But for Lerner and others, that framing shifts the concern rather than resolves it.

Airdrops are common across crypto. In Bitcoin, they are rare — and often messy.

Lerner argues that distributing eCash based on Bitcoin’s UTXO set — the collection of “unspent transaction outputs,” essentially the chunks of bitcoin that make up user balances — exposes users to avoidable operational risk, particularly if they try to claim the tokens.

“Airdropping to UTXO owners does not help bitcoiners and instead exposes them to significant risk,” he said, pointing to the need for users to move funds out of cold storage and interact with unfamiliar software.

That risk is compounded by the lack of full replay protection between the two chains. Without a clean separation, transactions intended for Bitcoin could inadvertently affect funds on the eCash network, or vice versa.

Dan Held, a Bitcoin entrepreneur, framed it more bluntly: “Reallocating Satoshi’s coins is shock value marketing, and the no-replay protection makes it quite hazardous to redeem.”

No-replay protection could allows a valid, signed transaction from the hard fork to be maliciously broadcast and accepted on another chain. This causes identical, unwanted transactions on both networks, leading to accidental loss of funds. It occurs when two chains share the same transaction format.

Distribution questions

Beyond security concerns, the distribution itself is being questioned.

Because Bitcoin ownership is often intermediated by exchanges, custodians and institutional platforms, the entity controlling private keys is not always the economic owner of the coins.

“The custodians controlling UTXO keys are often not the rightful economic owners,” Lerner said. “This places users who hold bitcoin through custodians at a disadvantage.”

In practice, that means some users may never receive eCash at all, while others may take on new risks to access it. For systems built on top of Bitcoin — including sidechains, like Rootstock, and federated custody networks — the situation becomes even more complex, potentially requiring coordination or upgrades to safely split coins across chains.

Lerner also criticized the project’s funding model, which allocates a portion of Satoshi-linked coins on the new chain to early investors, calling it “morally objectionable and unnecessary.”

Philosophical fault line

For others, the objection goes beyond mechanics.

Jay Polack, head of strategy at Bitcoin sidechain VerifiedX, sees the proposal as part of a broader category of attempts to reinterpret Bitcoin’s core properties through derivative systems.

“It’s mind boggling to think that anybody would think that’s a really good idea,” Polack said, referring to the combination of forking and reassigning dormant coins.

Polack argues that even indirect changes to how Bitcoin ownership is represented risk undermining the system’s core guarantee.

“You can’t break the native ownership of Bitcoin. It’s totally contradictory to what Bitcoin is,” he said.

In that framing, eCash is less about whether Bitcoin itself changes — it doesn’t — and more about whether the ecosystem should tolerate structures that reinterpret its ledger.

Most Bitcoin forks fail to gain meaningful traction. eCash may follow the same path.

But the reaction to it is already clarifying something else: Bitcoin’s resistance to change is not just about code or consensus rules. It extends to how users are expected to behave, how risk is introduced, and what kinds of experiments are considered acceptable at the edges.

Framed as an airdrop, eCash looks less like a challenge to Bitcoin — and more like a test of how far its social boundaries actually reach.