(What follows is a transcript of the AMA that was recently hosted in the SuperEx telegram channel. I thought it was a fantastic overview of the eCash project and so I am sharing it here in 16 different languages for people from all over the world to learn more about XEC.)
Hi, I am Kousha, eCash Community manager and here to conduct the AMA. We have collected questions from the SuperEx community and selected 15 of them to respond to here.
I will share the question and username of the person who has asked and then our reply that we have prepared. I am quite talkative, so bear with me if the responses are a bit longer. I hope you find value in a detailed answer đ
After the AMA I will make a PayToMany transaction to the 15 winners whose questions we’ve selected with the 10$ rewards for each winner.
I am happy to be here with SuperEx and without further ado, I will start the AMA!
1. Question by @Saftraore: What is the purpose of eCash?
This is a good question to start with: The purpose of eCash is to be a global electronic cash system. It is the continuation of the Bitcoin project that was invented to be a “Peer-2-Peer Electronic Cash System”.
It is one of the few crypto-projects that is actually defining itself as a crypto-currency*, while new projects nowadays have rather dropped the “currency” part.
eCash aims to be a highly scalable network with secure instant transaction finalization that can be used by billions of users around the globe.
The developer team is innovating and improving on its fundamental Bitcoin technology to make this happen. More details on the tech later…
2. Question by @Berrymelo: What are the advantages and perspectives of eCash developers after switching from Bitcoin Cash?
It is good we noted that eCash (XEC) is the continuation of the Bitcoin Cash Fork (BCH) in 2017, that was created by our developer team (Bitcoin ABC) as an alternative way to scale Bitcoin. Our network delivered on the promise of reliable, cheap and fast transactions with fees less than a cent.
We have a battle-tested and powerful team, but funding of development has always been a problem within open-source software and any Bitcoin network, BTC included. BTC’s decision to go for venture capital funding has led to a change in trajectory from P2P Cash to “Digital Gold”, while BCH’s lack of funding has stalled development and innovation and is ultimately unsustainable.
To solve this problem, the eCash team had to come up with something else than what BTC or BCH has as we deem both solutions suboptimal. So we implemented a free market approach that redirects a portion of the mining rewards to the specific node software that was used to successfully mine a block. This funding mechanism ensures that developer teams can retain talent, maintain, and optimize the network but it also allows for other node development teams to contribute and receive the reward, not just the core eCash team.
A good example of the benefit of this funding protocol is that eCash has been able to work on innovative implementations such as Avalanche Consensus (not related to AVAX), while developments on infrastructure have stalled on BCH and doesnât follow any coherent roadmap as it used to.
With 1-confirmation deposits (and soon instant deposits) on many big exchanges and other benefits, eCash has a lot to offer and a lot of potential, all thanks to our unique funding approach.
The decision to split off into a new network and brand was not an easy one and we would’ve liked to have implemented this on BCH itself as lead maintainers, but creating eCash ultimately was the best decision available, as it enabled our team to continue working to improve the project as planned to be a reliable, well-maintained, super fast and a low-fee chain with highest security in the crypto space. In some ways it was also beneficial. People like the new brand and the idea of a soft âresetâ of Bitcoin holds lots of opportunity.
That one got longer than I expected, I told you I tend to go into detail đ
Let’s continue!
3. Question by @king80990: Wallet by application?
You can find a list of all verified wallets that support eCash on e.cash/wallets
Wallets maintained by the eCash team are:
âśď¸ Electrum ABC (for đť Desktop)
âśď¸ Cashtab.com (Browser Based đą+đť)
â ď¸ *Please be sure to always write down your 12 word seed phrase when creating a wallet!*
4. Question by @Ihech_i: How do eCash tokenomics work in detail?
As established above, eCash is a Bitcoin network, so its tokenomics work very similar to BTC. The supply, mining issuance and halving schedule is the same (estimated countdown created by one of our users here: ecashhalvingcountdown.netlify.app)
And since it is a network fork of BTC, the transaction history actually goes back to 2009, when Satoshi mined the first block ever. This means eCash already distributed more than 90% of its coins and we estimate a lot of coins to have been lost over time and during forks – so there are even less in circulation than on usual Bitcoin-chains. While we donât know exactly how many, you could consider a good chunk of them burned.
Please note that eCash has changed the denomination (zeros after comma) from 8 to 2. So 1 XEC is 100 Satoshi and known as a “bit” unit, while 1 BTC is 100.000.000 Satoshi commonly referred to as a “coin”. Meaning 1 million XEC is the same as 1 BTC in terms of Satoshi supply. And we therefore have 21 trillion XEC as opposed to 21 million. Think of it as changing your base unit from 1 Dollar to 100 Cents. The supply is the same but the unit we look at is different.
This means as a reference right now 1 mXEC is about $32. Even though our project is battle tested since years and has a long transaction history, the network itself is still in its early days and as you can see from the price we have a lot of room to grow. You can find more details on the supply on eCash.supply
5. Question by @commandfss: How many exchanges is your token listed on at present and also can we buy the token on pancake swap?
Some notable exchanges to mention are Binance, Kucoin, Indodax, Huobi, OKX, and many more.
You can find the list of all exchanges, apps and services that support eCash (XEC) on a ranked list on scorecard.cash. (Soon, we will add SuperEx on this list, too)
To find a suitable exchange based on the currency you want to buy it with you can also visit buyecash.com
â ď¸ Since eCash has its own blockchain and is not a token on a smart chain you can not buy our native coin on pancake swap. There is only a âwrapped XECâ issued by Binance that you can buy there. But we do not recommend this, because it involves counterparty risk (in this case you trust Binance to redeem real eCash for this wrapped coin). Should you have bought wrapped XEC on the Binance Smart Chain, you can simply deposit it on the Binance exchange and withdraw our native eCash instead (use network option: âeCashâ).
âď¸ Quick note: We are planning future interoperability with smart chains via an EVM. Then you would be able to bridge coins either way from eCash to other smart chains like ETH.
6. Question by @imprince17: Many projects have a very good start and then they give up on the project. There is no active communication with the community and anonymous developers. Can your team handle this? And does your team have good relationships with the community and users? And Almost 4/5 of investors are focused purely on the price of token in short term instead of understanding the real value and health of the project. How can you ensure for us that holding this token is more beneficial for long-term and what is your plan to increase the demand and scarcity of the token?
Our developers and founders are fortunately not anonymous and we also have a community manager (me!) to keep close contact to our community and interested investors of all kinds. While I agree that many people only look at price, I also think that over time people tend to naturally choose to use cryptocurrencies that solve their problems and cater to their needs.
eCash is a network that tries to solve an important problem: Money. And the network also ticks many boxes in terms of fundamentals: It has super low fees and is highly scalable and can therefore be used as a global payment network. It also supports tokens via our eToken protocol, so it is ready to be used as a means to transact stablecoins and other token-projects. It also has super high security, so exchanges are happy to accept it after only 1-confirmation. Traders will be happy to take advantage of these super fast deposit times that enable efficient arbitrage opportunities.
So, we think eCash has a broad spectrum of uses, but above all its main use as global payment network will become more important over time as people try to find an alternative to CBDC money that is not in centralized control. XEC is a real cryptocurrency competitor to these kinds of technologies that are sure to come to us very soon.
The scarcity of the token is already very high, Bitcoinâs tokenomics apply to our network, too. And we plan to generate demand by solving people’s problems to have a simple, instant, secure and highly versatile network they can immediately connect to and use, especially for value transfer like payments or remittances. While the eCash network is fairly new, our project and team has a long track-record and is innovative and sustainable in its approach. As our founder once said: âeCash will be there in the future, when many other projects that are hyped now are dead and gone.â
I believe so as well. We are very committed to the goal of fulfilling what was laid out in the Bitcoin whitepaper. Namely, creating a global peer-2-peer electronic cash system.
I know I repeated myself a bit with that one – but some things need to be said twice đđ
7. Question by @Jade: Can payments be traced?
Like Bitcoin, the blockchain ledger and transaction history is public and therefore your transactions can be traced. However, we have an optional privacy feature implemented in our Electrum ABC wallet. It is called CashFusion and it is a âCoinJoinâ implementation. It is similar to a coin-mixing tool, but it is completely non-custodial. So you can opt-in to obfuscate traces of your coins with 1-click.
It is simple to use and super-cheap as transaction fees on eCash are below 1 cent. Furthermore, our Avalanche Consensus integration allows for implementation of sidechain technology and we are looking into the possibility to enable a sidechain with “zero-knowledge” privacy in the future, which would increase our “pretty good privacy” of CashFusion into âabsolute bulletproof privacyâ via a state of the art zero-knowledge protocol. But this is a consideration for the future. For now you can use CashFusion and people will have a hard time to trace your spending activities.
âď¸ What is important to note here is that pure privacy coins often have the issue of their supply not being transparent and auditable. Our privacy feature enables people to have privacy if they need it, but also to have a publicly auditable supply – which is important to ensure no one is printing new coins out of thin air through exploits / bugs.
8. Question by @cambist1: What is CashTab? eCash XEC?
Cashtab is our reference web-wallet. It is simple to use, runs in your browser and therefore doesn’t need to be downloaded via app stores and fundamentally showcases what our ecosystem is capable of.
With this wallet you can send and receive transactions, make signatures, but also write messages publicly or privately to other users. You can also create your own token and calculate and distribute airdrops to token holders all within the wallet with a few clicks.
You can try out Cashtab.com wallet and compare it with other wallets like MetaMask or similar, and you will see for yourself how easy it is to use it, how versatile it is, and how fast it is compared to other chains, all while fees are below a cent. Cashtab will be continuously improving over time to incorporate more and more cool features.
With the coming update on May 15th we will also activate the “eCash aliases” feature, which lets you buy decentralized user-handles for your wallet. This means you can buy “yourname.xec” and use it instead of your wallet address to receive funds. This is in line with our goal to improve eCash beyond what most other blockchains do to make it simple and convenient for our community and user base to use our services. We plan to make aliases tradeable in the future, too.
9. Question by @ossietim: How do we get more crypto people as well as the big corporates to adopt XEC? NFT marketplace?
In my personal opinion NFTs are already on the way out. It was one of the few trends that did not solve an important problem, other than generate hype and enable more speculation. It may have some niche use but not more than that. Now all the hype is about Ai and before NFTs it was Metaverse and before that it was Meme-tokens. There is always going to be excessive hypes that ultimately are a distraction from the goal of what cryptocurrency was set out to achieve.
But you are correct that corporations love to sell digital goods via NFTs to people. It’s cheap and quick money for them and a good way to connect to their communities and user base. So this trend gained interest from corporations to look into blockchain as a tool to generate revenue and exclusivity. But it is still very niche. And I would say for now it also canât be more than that for technological reasons.
What is much more important is that a network has the optimal infrastructure providing the throughput needed to actually service a corporation’s real needs. If Microsoft, Apple, Facebook or Twitter want to start using a blockchain as intended directly on-chain, they wonât accept any network that canât handle millions of transactions per second in user requests and is built on unreliable infrastructure.
Before working in crypto, our founder, Amaury SĂŠchet, was working for Facebook as a database scaling engineer and he knows that if we want big corporations to actually embrace blockchain, the technology has to be a lot more powerful than many of the chains today. This is what we’re going to provide with eCash and there is not much competition when it comes to the quality of our roadmap and reliability, feasibility, scale, security, and efficiency of our chain.
10. Question by @Mohan44s: What makes eCash unique?
With the Avalanche protocol integration (not connected to AVAX) we have a Nakamoto (PoW) + Avalanche (PoS) hybrid consensus network, that is both trustless as well as efficient. Our low fees are undefeated, and our chain is now super secure as proven by the 1-confirmation deposits on exchanges, who still wait for 6 confirmations on BTC for example, before crediting your funds. In the near future this will be improved even further with secure instant finality within seconds.
Our scaling approach is unique and one of our core strengths, along with our drive to innovate and an excellent engineering ethic, we pave the way to many ambitious statistics, when the project is built out. Such as:
– 5 million transactions per second
– 3 second transaction finality
– Guaranteed sub-cent fees forever
– Simple tokens and NFTs with our eToken protocol
– Optional privacy
– Simple and robust smart contracts
– Integrated indexer (more efficient infrastructure)
– EVM and other Sidechains
– Staking rewards for Avalanche enabled nodes
– and more!
All in all we are an agile next generation blockchain that is trustless and super secure like Bitcoin but also super efficient with lots of utility. Our network is the best of both worlds and highly competitive, if I may say so.
Please keep in mind that some of these features are still in development and will be achieved over time as parts of our roadmap.
11. Question by @mrutyubca: When can we see Post-Avalanche on eCash?
The Post-Consensus Avalanche milestone has already gone live last year. With this upgrade we have improved security by a lot, so that exchanges are happy to credit 1-confirmation deposits and it also laid out the foundation for Pre-Consensus, which is one of our major items for massive scaling.
Your question probably is referring to the second milestone, Pre-Consensus. With Pre-Consensus the user benefit would be finalized deposits within seconds. There are many benefits for the network as a whole, for example the ability to create Sidechains and more, but we know users will feel a direct benefit through instant deposits on exchanges the most.
As with any major prototypes like Avalanche, there is no ETA on when it will be ready. However, the project is progressing fine and it won’t take too long to go live. Ideally we want it to come out this year, but you never know what developments and testing down the road will reveal that might make the project take longer to go live, so we can’t give you a set date on that. We thank you for your patience, I assure you it will pay out in the long run.
More on Avalanche integration here: avalanche.cash
Please note that Avalanche Consensus is not connected to the AVAX blockchain, that holds the same name. Both AVAX and eCash are using their own integration of the Avalanche Consensus. However, eCash uses Avalanche in combination with its underlying Nakamoto Consensus to gain the benefits of both consensus protocols and negate each otherâs weaknesses.
Hereâs a twitter thread I created a while ago, that gives an overview about Avalanche, if you are interested:
12. Question by @Ayoafoo: What possible ways can eCash change the crypto world?
Let me answer this in two ways.
1. How can eCash change the world: With today’s rush by government and central banks to create a CBDC and to push everything and everybody and their identity into the digital realm, you want to front-run the move into the digital space by keeping things permissionless and decentralized. We are providing a competitive public network that is open to be used and built upon by anyone around the globe without having to ask for permission or being under the threat of surveillance or censorship. In our mission statement we state: “Crypto development is a technological arms race for the defense of personal freedom. eCash is the technology of financial freedom, and that’s why we’re here.”
2. And how can eCash change the crypto world: Our project is doing things differently than most other crypto projects. The industry has decided that Bitcoin cannot scale and that many scaling solutions have to come via âLayer-2â technology. However this adds a lot of complexity, and in many cases does not fix the issue. Many Layer-2 technologies still canât scale well, are highly centralized or suffer from initial on-ramp fees, among other problems. With eCash progressing and innovating as a chain that is both super secure and also super efficient, and that is still a trustless proof-of-work blockchain, we are pioneering developments and show that our scaling approach is the actual way to go.
Also, our main goal to be an electronic cash system is still the killer use-case for blockchain that is going to get more and more important over the next years. Much more than gambling, dog-memes or monkey-jpegs, for sure. If we get this right, all these secondary use cases can follow easily.
13. Question by @yunasmf: What regulatory risks could affect $XEC? And what regulatory approvals does $XEC need and how far is the progress?
eCash has the benefit that it is fundamentally Bitcoin technology. With its distributed mining issuance and tokenomics we believe it will benefit from all regulatory decisions made towards Bitcoin as a commodity as opposed to be a security. Our chain is fundamentally meant to be a public payment network and our currency is issued neutrally and in a decentralized manner. We do not face issues like other projects who had ICOs or presales or venture capital backing the projects as we are a truly public blockchain and focus on utility. The network is also super secure with a focus on privacy – no one needs anyone’s regulatory approval to build on, accept or pay with eCash.
So, while governments and institutions will always try to regulate or license any successful network, they are going to have a hard time to clamp down on a public, decentralized blockchain like eCash.
14. Question by @kingDavididenyi: Lots of investors hit and run during the sale and sell session after listing on the first exchange, WHAT DO you say about this? How do you stop early investors from selling tokens?
This is an issue with many of the new token projects and schemes that have initial sales or fundings and a lot of money poured into marketing, while the underlying technology is underwhelming or centralized, and are often just a niche-product at most. These are crypto-projects that ultimately sell out to big money to the detriment of retail investors who come in far later and are usually used as exit liquidity for guaranteed gains of corporate investors.
Our chain is issuing coins in a distributed manner and fairly via mining. We do not have any control over coins and do not give them away in presales or even for paid listings. Our project is supported by exchanges out of interest in the fundamental technology and trust in our development team.
Anyone can get a hold of eCash in the same manner, from retail to big corporations. At some point investors will want to take profits, this is natural, but no one at eCash has gained an unfair advantage at buying coins way under price in an early sale to dump at will on retail.
In fact, we are still in very low price levels compared to our ATH at $350/mXEC ($0.00035/XEC) and anyone has the same chances to get on board as anyone else; eCash is for everyone.
15. Question by @Rav132: How is eCash superior to Bitcoin?
eCash is simply Bitcoin that is allowed to scale and improve. It is Bitcoin, but better. BTC engineers have made the decision to not make major changes to upgrade the network to meet demand. This is the reason the eCash team (Bitcoin ABC) has forked off in 2017. We at eCash think that there is a reasonable way to improve Bitcoin and make it the most powerful blockchain in the space. This type of leading, innovative Bitcoin exists in the form of eCash.
Next to being able to scale to global demand, our chain is actually more secure than BTC, because of our Avalanche Consensus integration. We have powerful operational codes that enable some simple but robust smart contracts and tokens.
We have also provided a solution to achieve neutral funding to reinvest into development. Unlike other forks that are dependent on backporting BTCâs code, we are well on our way to having âownershipâ of our code and maintenance independent of BTC. You can see this with the innovative Avalanche integration and also our aliases feature or Chronik indexer.
An integrated indexer was suggested for Bitcoin for a long time but it never came to fruition. With this indexer integrated right into our node, it will be much easier and more reliable for developers to build on eCash. All in all, we will show the world what Bitcoin actually can achieve, if you do it right.
A Bitcoin with Staking Rewards, EVM- and other Sidechains, Tokens, Smart Contracts, Top-Security, 1-Click Privacy, Sub-cent Fees, Instant Transaction Finality and 5 million Transactions Per Second for mankind scale. A next generation blockchain and a true cryptocurrency that is both a store of value and a means of exchange. Letâs go! đ
Bonus Question by Call Me GONE: Now the biggest problem in crypto is security, in recent times there are many projects that have been hacked that have taken away the user’s resources. So how do you ensure the security of your project? What are you doing for the security of your platform? Tell us about the security of your Project?
I am happy to answer that one.
Many of the hacks that you mentioned are on centralized services, complex smart contracts or on layer-2 extensions of projects.
The eCash network is robust in its simplicity. It is the beauty of the Bitcoin network that it is not that complex, but still so powerful and robust. You don’t hear about “Bitcoin network has been hacked”. Same goes for eCash as it is ultimately a Bitcoin-derived network. This network is battle tested.
Even our Avalanche integration is not a second layer protocol, but works in tandem to the core Nakamoto protocol. It is also a very robust protocol.
All in all you can be assured that you won’t have major outtakes like on many of the centralized chains or large scale hacks where funds can get stolen.
And as for the risk of 51% attacks that would be a general risk for blockchains:
eCash is extra equipped with its Avalanche network. As mentioned earlier, we are more secure in terms of 51% attack protection than BTC.
This means exchanges and services can easily accept eCash transactions / deposits with just 1-confirmation without any fear of double spend or rollback of the chain. On BTC, which is known as the most secure chain, they still wait for 6 confirmations.
This level of security can only be topped by us again, when Avalanche Pre-Consensus comes out – then we have this level of security within 3 seconds of a transaction and you don’t even need to wait for confirmations anymore. This top-security within seconds enables many new use cases that were mostly impossible on blockchain generally.
Bonus Question 2 by AKI PAW PAW: Are you planning to promote your project in countries / regions where English is not good? Do you have a local community for them to better understand your project??
Yes we have many community run local projects. All with their own native language. You can find them on our community index: eCash.community
We also have an open translation program, where people can translate eCash content into one of a list of major languages and by doing so receive a small XEC and eToken reward for each translation or review.
We want our videos, posts and website ideally to be translated in many languages and this is an opportunity for people to earn a bit of XEC by contributing as community translators.