People often message me asking if they should invest in eCash. They ask me questions like how much XEC do I need? Or how long before the price will go up?
My usual response is that nobody can see the future, and that only they can decide what’s best for their situation. But then I thought of all the other questions people ask each other every day. Questions like should I go to college? Should I change jobs? Should I buy a house? You get the idea.
People ask each other these questions because sometimes they aren’t sure what to do, and maybe hearing another person’s perspective might help. That is what I’m hoping to do here. So we’re perfectly clear, what follows isn’t intended to be financial advice but just one man’s perspective.
(Full disclosure, eCash represents a significant portion of my net worth. Therefore, I have every incentive to want it to succeed. Whether you think that clouds my judgement or prevents me from being intellectually honest about the situation is for you to decide. How you choose to invest your money is your decision and yours alone. No one knows your situation better than you do, and you’re the one who will ultimately have to live with your decision, no matter what that may be.)
Let me begin by stating the obvious: all investments come with risk and uncertainty. Nowhere is that more true than in crypto. But it’s also risk and uncertainty that creates opportunity. For example, if everyone knew eCash was going to succeed, if billions of people were already using it in daily commerce, with tens of thousands of eCash Avalanche nodes helping to secure the network, you’d have to be an idiot not to get your hands on some XEC.
But we’re clearly still a long ways away from that scenario, which is why the market cap of XEC remains roughly 1/1000th that of BTC. The question is, will eCash ever achieve the scenario I described above, or will it fail to get off the launch pad?
Only time will tell, of course, but if I didn’t think eCash had a reasonable chance of becoming a global payment system within my lifetime, I’d have sold my XEC long ago.
Recently, the crypto world has been buzzing about a certain meme coin. A coin that proudly admits (though maybe proudly isn’t the right word considering it’s at the very bottom of their website) that it has “no intrinsic value or expectation of financial return”, has “no formal team or roadmap”, and “the coin is completely useless and for entertainment purposes only.”
If that was the mission statement of eCash, I’d be an idiot to have poured so much of my time, energy, and capital into it. But thankfully, eCash isn’t PEPE, and the goal of XEC isn’t to become a meme, but to be the best money the world has ever seen. Not only that but it’s developed by one of the most experienced engineering teams in all of blockchain. There is a clear roadmap detailing how the project intends to scale and improve incrementally over time, and there’s certainly an expectation of financial return because the people working on eCash are paid in the native currency of the network by the miners who support the chain.
Of course just because the developers are paid in XEC doesn’t mean it’s guaranteed to succeed. While they may have every incentive to make the number go up, there is no way to know what the final outcome will be. First, you have all the risks that come with crypto in general. The risk of governments trying to shut it down, of banks trying to shut us out, not to mention all the global macroeconomic uncertainty that has been dominating headlines for the past couple of years.
Then there is the fact that eCash comes with its own unique set of risks. While the team is working hard, the truth is they can’t afford to make any mistakes. As a small project with limited funding, eCash doesn’t have the luxury of thousands of developers working on it like Ethereum does. There’s also the risk of large amounts of XEC that could still flood the market due to the BCH holders who have yet to split their coins. It also doesn’t help that no US exchange has listed XEC despite all the technical progress that’s been made since the project’s launch.
For some people, these could be seen as reasons not to invest in XEC, and it would be totally understandable. But for me, I remain invested in eCash because where others see risk, I see opportunity.
Take for example the fact that Bitcoin ABC only has a limited amount of funding while other projects have years of runway left in their treasury. I get why someone might prefer to invest in a project in the latter situation. It’s the safer bet. But the way I see it, the situation Bitcoin ABC finds itself in means they have no choice but to deliver. In other words, they are properly motivated and incentivized not to be complacent. This makes XEC the riskier bet, but with greater risk comes greater potential rewards.
As for the whales who might be sitting on unsplit XEC, my view is that if they didn’t bother to split their coins when XEC was worth ten times what it is now, I’m not worried they’re going to go to the trouble of splitting them to dump at these prices. So while unsplit XEC could mean more selling pressure on the way up, I don’t see it as a reason to fear investing in XEC today.
And finally, with regard to no US exchanges having yet to list XEC, I’d be more worried if eCash was already listed on those exchanges and the prices were still where they are now. Think about it this way, while almost all of eCash’s competitors have the advantage of being on Coinbase, Robinhood, Paypal, Bitpay, and so on, eCash has managed to come this far without their help. What do you think will happen when eCash finally does get integrated into all those platforms?
But I’m not invested in eCash because I’m simply waiting for a Coinbase announcement and the potential pump that could ensue. I’m invested in eCash because I see the massive opportunity it represents, not just to make a quick 10x, not just to change my life and that of my family’s, but to change civilization as we know it.
I believe in the eCash project because while so many institutions around me seem to be falling apart or breaking down under the weight of their own incompetence and short-sightedness, the eCash project just continues to improve with each improvement bringing the project closer to its goal.
Improvements like the upcoming integration of the Chronik indexer directly into the node software, which will make it easier for developers to build on eCash. This is in conjunction with the work being done to sort out the “app dev libraries” so that in the future developers will have the tooling they need to come up with applications that leverage the speed and affordability of the XEC chain.
There’s also the upcoming launch of Avalanche pre-consensus, which will finally make it possible for exchanges and merchants to safely accept 0-confirmation transactions without having to worry about double spends. Transactions will be instant and final in a way that no other Bitcoin fork has ever previously achieved. I believe this will unlock all kinds of new use cases and help open people’s eyes to why the early cypherpunks were so excited by Satoshi Nakamoto’s invention in the first place.
But that’s not all. Avalanche pre-consensus will pave the way for everything from eCash staking rewards, to dynamic block sizes, to subnets, and much more. There’s also the upcoming launch of eCash aliases to look forward to, as well as the eagerly awaited Paybutton project.
In one week, eCash will undergo its regularly scheduled semi-annual upgrade on May 15. This will finally remove the chained transaction limit, introduce consensus-enforced transaction versions, as well as moving the miner fund from consensus to policy.
Will all these improvements be enough, or will they be too little too late? Will everything go as planned, or will they run into unexpected hurdles? How will the market react to these developments or will the market continue to value meme tokens over coins with actual fundamentals?
These questions and more remain to be answered, but for me, I’m invested in eCash because I think it offers one of the best asymmetric bets in history where the potential rewards far outweigh the potential risks.
But that’s me. You’ll have to do your own research and ask yourself how much conviction do you have in this project? What are your investment objectives? How much risk can you handle? What kind of world do you want to see in the future? What other investment alternatives are available to you? Do you plan on adding value to the eCash ecosystem, or will you just be a passive investor? Do you think eCash is just a pipe dream, or do you believe as I do that it has the potential to achieve mass adoption?
Only you can decide how to answer those questions, since only you will have to live with whatever choice you make. Either way, I wish you good luck, and remember, 1M XEC today is only about $25, or less than 0.001 BTC, and as Satoshi once wrote, “It might make sense just to get some in case it catches on.”