ECX Fork Tumbles 76% From Its High While a $6.3B Binance Hack Eats the Headlines

Ecash (ECX) was changing hands just above $32 at 4:15 p.m. Eastern on Wednesday, Nov. 4, 2026 — roughly 76% below the all-time high of $134.97 it printed earlier in its short life. The token gave up nearly 31% of its value in the previous 24 hours alone. Its market cap now sits around $639 million, near the bottom of the top 100 cryptocurrencies.

The timing was brutal. Sztorc's fork staged its mainnet debut on Oct. 29, 2026, the very day a $6.3 billion hack of Binance dominated every feed in the industry. That breach of the world's largest exchange by trading volume pulled attention — and capital — away from the Ecash rollout. Even Luke Dashjr and the BIP110-Bitcoin Knots faction, a competing fork, managed to generate more buzz than Sztorc's carefully planned one.

Unlike the BIP110 effort, Sztorc's ECX was deliberately orchestrated. The Layertwo Labs founder structured the rollout in three phases and handed nearly every bitcoin holder an equal ECX balance at a 1:1 ratio — everyone except Satoshi Nakamoto. Mainnet went live one day before the 18th anniversary of the Bitcoin white paper.

The chain is up and running. By Nov. 4, Ecash mainnet was producing blocks with roughly 943 petahash per second of computing power behind it, closing in on the 1 exahash threshold. Trading venues, though, are another story: Neoxa Exchange is doing the heavy lifting, much as it did for the BIP110 fork, and its ECX/USDC pair ranks as the platform's third most active market.

Ranking among bitcoin and its forks, ECX holds fourth by market cap, per figures on eCash's own website — behind bitcoin, bitcoin blake2b and bitcoin cash, but ahead of bitcoin sv and the older Ecash chain that split from bitcoin cash. Bitcoin blake2b, trading as BTCB2 or the contentious XBT, is priced far higher at $317 per coin, according to Bitcoin.com News.

Both tokens live in thinly traded ecosystems with sparse exchange support, where even a modest swap can whipsaw a price. The lesson, as the market keeps demonstrating: a clever airdrop and a good launch date don't manufacture relevance. Unless ECX builds real utility and lands broader listings, its early valuation may read as speculation rather than adoption.