By Nate Novosel

The 2025 Electronic Cash Conference was on October 4, 2025. The big news, of course, was the announcement that Avalanche Pre-Consensus would go live on November 15, 2025. However, there were several sessions that day, and I took notes as quickly as I could for people who could not attend (I also live-tweeted the event on X). Below are those notes. Forgive me if some don’t make much sense out of context of the session or read like presentation slide transcription, but it was the best I could do from 2am-11am EDT to keep up with the presentations.

Why eCash Is the Best Network for Stablecoins

By Vin Armani

Vin is going to speak about what he’s been working on for about 6 years: stablecoins on Bitcoin.  Started with Bitcoin Cash and continued on eCash.  Many on eCash might be ambivalent about stablecoins, but we should be open to it because eCash is the best network for it.

Killer App

  • Example: email was the internet’s killer app.
  • Bitcoin’s “killer app” is stablecoins: tokenized fiat.

Venezuela embraces stablecoins amid bolivar collapse and soaring inflation—it is saving the country from cratering fiat and hyperinflation.

It proves the core value of Bitcoin as peer-to-peer electronic cash without a third party.

Tether is looking at a $500B valuation. If it reaches that, it would make Tether the most valuable privately held company in the world. That’s more valuable than SpaceX.

The first 100 Tether was minted in October 2014 on BTC—and, due to eCash being a fork of a fork of Bitcoin—is on eCash.

Then, they started to mint on Ethereum.  Why did it leave?  Is it an opportunity that the greater market as a whole not seeing?

The Ethereum shift was a step backwards.  The UTXO model of Bitcoin is scalable and perfectly suited for P2P cash model.  The account model is a true ledger.  The UTXO model is unique and allows us to do some interesting things.

ETH requires gas fees for token transactions.  So, if you want to move a token, you need to have enough ETH to pay the fees.

They were working on BCH in 2020 a gasless token experience (known as “postage”).

The issue with accepting cryptocurrency for payments was the volatility of the currency.  If they took BTC and BTC dropped 10%, then they lost 10%.  So, they offered to transact in stablecoins along with cashing them out for 1% fee (CCs were 4% for them, so they took it immediately).

The custodian was Binance, and they provided a one-token user experience without gas.  No one pushed it; it happened on its own.

The only loss is digital sovereignty.  There is a “free” version and a “not free” version, for example, from Binance.  If we don’t fight, we’ll only get the “not free” version.  If it’s all just custodial Binance. (note: he is referring to “free” as in free from third parties, not no cost)

GENIUS Act allows banks to participate.  Visa now has an ad saying how great stablecoins are.  The banks are now getting involved in stablecoins.  Do you think that’s going to be the peer-to-peer experience or the custodial experience?

World Liberty Finance is an example of a major partnership between major players and the Trump Administration.

Circle is now exploring “reversible” transactions.  This goes against the crypto ethos.  The second sentence of the Bitcoin whitepaper talks about avoiding double-spends.  This is the antithesis of that.

Introduces the island of Tinian and their unique combination of U.S. citizenship status with self-rule (i.e., U.S. citizens can’t buy land there).  They passed a law and minted a stablecoin.  The law was vetoed, but that veto was overruled by a supermajority vote.

Wyoming launched the first state-issued stable coin recently as well.

Introducing MUSD on eCash.  Vin welcomes attendees to collaborate with him because “it’s going to be a gold rush” (meaning people will swarm to innovate with this new sovereign cryptocurrency stablecoin).

Why reinvent the wheel?  The only way this works this well is Bitcoin (UTXO), and the best version of this is eCash.  It’s proven, it enables multi-output transactions, and it has a robust tech stack.

If you’re interested in getting involved, stablecoins are going to take off.

Q&A

What is the status of the legal battles over the Tinian-issued stablecoin?

With a population of under 50,000, there are local political battles between influential families and islands.  The political battle is over the way the law was passed (some claim it’s local).  They’re debating use cases, etc. and the U.S. regulation situation.

What do you think makes eCash so special?

Some protocols don’t enable this.  BitcoinABC did.  They fight to keep things simple yet include the infrastructure components necessary to grow the capabilities of the chain.  A lot of it is the people.  Avalanche as well.  I’m betting on BitcoinABC and eCash.  So is the government of this place (Tinian).

Can you compare the stablecoins done with eCash vs. the already existing giants like USDT or USDC?

The result of this GENIUS Act is that you’ll have bank-issued stablecoins, but you won’t have too many more private issuers.  Any U.S. entity would be committing a crime if they created a stablecoin.  You have to be a licensed and regulated entity.

Unlocking the Power of Bitcoin Script

By Mathieu Geukens

Thanks to everyone who pushes P2P electronic cash forward.

Background: in crypto since 2017, BCH since 2018, studied economics, and worked on several crypto projects.

The Script System is the most interesting part of Bitcoin. (referring to any Bitcoin-like chain, not just BTC)

Cryptocurrency as an application platform for smart contracts.  It’s the most permissionless application platform.  Allows for disintermediation (non-custodial and trust-minimized). Custom spending requirements (like multisigs). Uniquely suited for financial applications (derivatives, financial assets, yield instruments, crowdfunding, etc.).

After BCH was created, a lot of work was put into this work.

Satoshi disabled a bunch of opcodes before he left.  The 2018 script upgrade was a major unlock.  BTC devs still aspire to have OP_CAT and OP_CHECKDATASIG.  Development on XEC has been on other areas than script (since 2018).  He wants to make the case for reprioritizing script development.

General Script Problems

Every developer working with script in Bitcoin/XEC:

  • Need for roundabout emulations
    (64-bit math, OP_MUL, introspection)
  • Badly designed VM limits
  • Lack of accessible, high-level tooling
  • Especially the combination of need for emulation + the limits is bad.

If your script gets too large, you have to cut functionality.

Can we build MakerDAO on Bitcoin Cash?

3 Main Problems Hindering Contracts

  • Redundant repetition
  • Outdated script
  • Unverifiable tokens

Outdated script such as outdated stack ops, limited arithmetic, etc.

Tobias was right about the problem.

Mathieu’s main problems:

  • Native fungible tokens
  • Native NFTs (contract state, authentication, and attestations)
  • Solve roundabout emulations (64-bit math, OP_MUL, introspection)

Note: not even loops or VM limits are required

But script-verifiable tokens are a hard requirements!

Script-Verified Tokens

Tokens are an important building block for many applications

“Back-to-genesis” problem on BCH/XEC/BSV

With OP_CAT + SegWit (a CAT20-token standard already exists)

With “detached proofs”, we would have had the same on BCH/XEC/BSV, so we almost had script-verifiable tokens by accident!

Suggestions:

  • Develop high-level tooling
  • add native introspection
  • fix the VM limits

We see BTC looking at the “Great Script Restoration” vs. Simplicity (replacing the whole VM)

XEC has a choice to make here whether to embrace script, add new VM, or offload programmability to L2

How to embrace script?

Benefits of the BCH approach:

  • CashTokens did not break the transaction format
  • Native Introspection not waiting for new transaction format
  • Native Introspection & re-targeted VM limits unblocks application devs
  • Retargeted VM Limits as the enabler for new primitives
  • New primitives encourage tooling and compiler work

Shows the “periodic table” of Opcodes with new ones highlighted.

Pitch to eCash developers:

  • Need a counterweight to EVM as a standard
  • Sharing developer and tooling network effects
  • Network effects are crucial for the application layer to become an ecosystem
  • My hope is to not have needless incompatibilities
  • Let’s consider converging on the CashVM

Q&A

Which feature do you want to add the most with these new Opcodes?

Things like loops and functions for authentication and other applications.  Zero-knowledge and quantum proof applications are examples.

Issue raised: Some coins like Cardano and Bitcoin Unlimited have multiple VMs. So, we should be careful because there’s a tradeoff between trying to do something better and a proliferation of solutions.

New Transaction Format: For or Against

By Tobias Ruck

Tobias is the CTO of TixTown and also developed the Chronik Indexer and worked on a lot of other things like libraries, Agora, and other projects.

Three reasons for a new transaction format:

  • Efficiency (millions of transactions per second)
  • Fixes (fixing long-standing issues)
  • Features (add new capabilities)

Efficiency:

  • Splitting transaction-local and existence validation
  • UTXO hash set
  • Compact transaction
  • Intcode

Efficiency

Status quo: too many round-trips

  • Step 1: look up the UTXOs
  • Step 2: verify the transaction
  • Step 3: UTXO update

How to fix it:

Simply add the UTXO to the input, which removes the first step (UTXO lookup)

Now:

  • Step 1: Verify
  • Steps 2 and 3: UTXO existence check and update

Old: DB of all UTXOs indexed by outpoint

New: DB of all UTXO hashes

Result: >64 bytes per UTXO -> 32 bytes per UTXO

Intcode

Average space savings for blocks: over 10%

Fixes

  • Don’t include the signatures as part of the transaction ID
  • Covenant Attested Token (CAT) Protocol – miner-validated tokens.
  • Miner-enforced tokens
    • SPV with tokens – SLP requires trusting the indexer
    • assumeutxo with tokens
    • Bidirectional Agora – Agora only goes from token->XEC; miner-enforced tokens would allow XEC->token or token->token offers
    • Token shareholder-owned UTXO – XEC/Tokens can be locked in

Features

  • Transaction Introspection Opcodes
  • Preambles
  • Flexible transactions
    • What if we want to add more fields?
    • Future-proof the transaction format so new fields can be added

Transaction Introspection Opcodes

  • Have them on BCH
  • They don’t have them on XEC because they have an alternative (OP_CHECKDATASIGVERIFY and OP_CHECKSIG), but those can be simplified

Preambles – Efficient induction proofs

  • Verify tokens in script
  • CAT Protocol or CashTokens could solve buy order issues

Scale of miner-enforced tokens

  • SLP/ALP – no consensus change
  • CAT tokens – beneficial but requires a change
  • Cashtokens – Ultimate protocol – devs are confident that this covers all potential use cases
  • Is there an in-between solution?

Preamble tokens: small, generic change – add minimal primitives to make convenient tokens without committing to a protocol

Inflatable token preamble example – if you have at least 1 input token, you can mint more

  • With just a few Opcodes, you can get to a lot of capabilities in a compact way

More examples:

  • Upgradable token preamble
  • Wrapped token preamble (can burn, etc. on demand)
  • Lock UTXO to token holders

How to get there

  • Testnet – for testing
  • Signet – requires back port from core
  • Avalanche subnet – real activity with real tokens
  • Mainnet

Q&A

Would an SLP or ALP token be upgradable to a new format to take advantage of the new functionality like buy orders, or would you have to create a new token that would have that upgradability?

You can deprecate the old token and airdrop the new token to all the holders.

Darkest Before the Dawn: Unstoppable Small-Caps in an Age of Memes

By Joey King

We have a crisis of meaning, and so people find meaning in silly things like memecoins.

Crypto Today

  • Easily the most embarrassing “industry”
  • Dominated by speculation
  • Over a decade of mature tech; limited impact

Crypto enthusiasts are more defined by what they are against vs. what they are for: against traditional finance, etc.

Companies are flipping crypto into the traditional space, which creates financial distortion.

Ensloppification

  • Modernity often leads to degradation

Harsh Realities

  • Crypto is speculation first, tech second
  • Retail does not care about the tech
  • Memcoins replace emergent systems of meaning

Potential: Open source tools replace fragile monetary system

Memes are not new

  • People see memecoins and think the meme is the new and important thing
  • Memecoins are a symptom, not the cause

Companies trading like memes, memes trading like companies

  • Chipotle, for example, is not a tech company but is “worth” $52B
  • What is the IP of a burrito recipe?

What are the actual trends?

  • The impact of the internet on communications tech and human reality is massively underappreciated
  • No memecoin cult has survived a price collapse
  • Non-speculative use cases also have exponential growth

Internet impact under appreciated

  1. Mostly used to marginally improve legacy practices
  2. Often the result is…ensloppification
    1. Does LinkedIn really help you get a better job?
  3. We are only beginning to see the impact of the internet on things like money, etc.

Bored Ape vs. eCash – crypto with a rock-solid infrastructure is more sustainable.

Non-speculative crypto growth is exponential

  • The dominance of speculation has obscured persistent growth in cryptos mission tech

So what?  Why eCash?

  1. The problems crypto was founded to solve are getting worse
  2. The projects trying to solve them are getting better
  3. Very few projects are trying to solve them

There are not “limitless” cryptos

  1. Forks were very bad in 2017 because we had a speculative market
  2. Today: memes have comparative advantage in speculation
  3. Forking to preserve mission is better than stagnating

Small developments can push a system over the line

  • Athenian golden age kickstarted by mission-driven dev

With focus and determination, we can push through the memecoin nihilism to realize the potential that open source tools can replace a fragile monetary system.

eCash as a “fleet in being”

  • Cults of winning fade after losing
  • Long-term commitment to SHA256
  • Virtually 0 projects are building cash

Q&A

Why do you think severely flawed functional projects take off like ETH (gas fees), SOL (canceled transactions), etc.?

ETH was in the right place at the right time to improve upon BTC’s flaws, and then it had first-mover advantage after that.

What’s the distinction between cash-focused projects and other projects?

User interface.  Don’t bring users up these lofty theoretical mountains—make it simple and easy to use as cash.  It took a long time to get where we are to become serious cash, but it has to be something that’s practical, useful, and solves problems.  Interface.

What about Monero?  Good user experience?

God, no.

When was the last time you tried it?  With the new kick wallet, etc.

It’s been a while—18 months, but some of the UX is intrinsic to the project: no auditability.  It’s possible to have privacy AND auditability.  It’s an architecture decision that’s unsolvable at the UX level.

Interlude

By Tobias Ruck

Why is naming things so hard?

Americans cracked Enigma.

It’s why all programming is done in English today.

But is that really the best?

German would’ve been worse

German is not concise

George R.R. Martin’s Game of Thrones had to be broken up into two books because the text is so long.

However, German is precise.

English is not precise.

We saw her duck.

He fed her cat food.

They are hunting dogs.

Also, verbs and nouns are often the same word

Example: A ride and to ride.

This hurts programming!

But latin is concise and precise.

10 reasons to write programs in Latin.

  1. Backwards compatibility (for 2,000 years)
  2. Simple pronunciation (unlike English, where tough, cough, drought, though, etc. are all pronounced differently)
  3. Many “and” and “or” (et, ac, and -que)
  4. No articles
  5. Cases (motion toward/from)
  6. Future participle

Conclusion: Latin is backwards compatible for 2,000 years and has forms that allows us to express engineering ideas very precisely

Keynote: Overview of Upcoming eCash Features

By Amaury Séchet

There will be some repetition from previous presentations to tell the whole story.

eCash

  • Fast confirmation
  •  Transactions must go through or be rejected within 3s—longer than 5s is considered broken
  • Scalability
  •  The network must not crumble under load when numerous users use it.

Entropy

  • Nodes do not agree on what the “real” DAG is.
    • Some have accepted a transaction, not others
    • Chronological ordering differs
    • Node my disagree on double-spends
  • Until a block is found
    • This converges slowly

Shows an example of how nodes drift apart until a block is complete.

When a new block is found, nodes reconcile.  The node is idle most of the time.  You can be more productive if you move more of the workload into the idle time.  This will allow you to scale.

  • Nodes make no attempt to reconcile a state before a new block is found
  • Distance between nodes in state space can get large
    •  Fast block relay becomes harder
  • Transactions are in a “quantum state” before being mined

Nodes must fight entropy continuously

Removing dimensions

  • Each transaction is included or not
    • n bits of information (1 per transaction)
  • n transaction mean n! orderings
    • n * log(n) bits of information
  • The vast majority of entropy is ordering!
    • 10x for 1,000 transactions
    • 20x for 1,000,000 transactions
  • CTOR reduce the entropy to O(n)

Avalanche

  • Nodes fight entropy by running Avalanche
  • Nodes query each others following the Avalanche protocol to do so

Shows example of nodes staying in consensus between blocks.

In case of a 51% attack, a miner mines in secret

The secret chain is released all at once

  • All nodes reorg to the new chain
  • Transactions are reverted

All nodes will switch to an alternate block several blocks down

eCash Post-Consensus

  • Is it an attack?
  • Small reorgs do happen naturally.

Heartbeat

  • Node can start rejecting nodes based on subjective criteria, such as their own clock
  • Node can reject “turbo” blocks
  • Blocks come more regularly, improving user experience

Pre-Consensus

We established how to decide which block is seen first, network-wide

We used that knowledge to mitigate 51% attacks

We can use that knowledge to avoid double spends

Easy to describe, hard to implement!

  • Transactions are more numerous than blocks
  • It’s easy to produce large numbers of conflicts
  • Block template construction for mining

But benefits are numerous

  • Users can know when their transaction is finalized within 2 seconds.
  • A block’s content is more predictable, so fast block propagation is easier.
  • This improves scalability.

Transaction filtering can use subjective criteria

  • Dynamic fee based on network load.  The network can remain cheap to use and be resilient to spam.
  • Knot vs. Core style holy wars can be settled by the protocol.

Fighting entropy improves:

  • <2-second transaction finality
  • Scaling
  • Security against 51% attacks
  • Network stability with Heartbeat
  • Dynamic and subjective network policies

Pre-Consensus Launch

  • November 15, 2025 (12:00 UTC)
  • Pre-consensus will be live on eCash Mainnet

Q&A

What’s next?

We can do a fair amount of things to make pre-consensus better.  Dynamic fees.  Throughput.

Any changes in reward, voting, or other items?

Shift to 64-bit integer

Privacy

Instead of how Monero did it, you can have a privacy subnet.  You get auditability because the same amount that goes in comes out, but the subnet remains private.

The On-Chain Privacy Landscape and Beyond

By Reuben Yap

When working on a VPN service, financial institutions treated him like a criminal and either refused to do business with him or de-banked him.

Being cut off from the financial system made him passionate about digital cash.

Lawyer until 2017 and worked on Zcoin.

Challenges

  • Projects that implement privacy face both technical and regulatory challenges

Navigation

  • How projects can implement good privacy while reducing risk

Why privacy?

  • Personal Financial Privacy
  • Business Confidentiality
  • Protection in Oppressive Regimes
  • Journalists and Activists
  • Balance between the State and the Citizen

Myths of Privacy

  • Main use case is illicit activity
    • Same argument used against VPNs, E2E communications
  • Criminal use shows that your privacy works
    • Most illicit activity happens in stablecoins (63%) and Bitcoin still
    • Even DPRK’s use of Tornado Cash was bad
  • Digital cash money should be a neutral value transfer just like the internet is for information transfer

What is unchain privacy?

Privacy isn’t a single switch; it’s a spectrum of protections.  True financial privacy aims to conceal:

  • Sender
  • Receiver
  • Amount
  • Transaction Graph
  • Asset Type
  • Network Layer

Privacy Protocols: A Comparison

  • CoinJoins: Collaborative mixing
  • Ring Signatures: Plausible deniability
  • Mimblewimble

Coinjoins combine multiple transactions into a large transaction where you can’t tell where money came from and went to (but the money totals in and out are still auditable).

CashFusion

  • Amount: Variable
  • Core Principle: Combinatorial Ambiguity
  • Architecture: Centralized Coordinator

Other CoinJoins:

  • Whirlpool
  • WabiSabi
  • CoinShuffle++

CoinJoin Pros and Cons

Benefits:

  • Quantum Resistant
  • Protocol Simplicity
  • Regulatory Friendliness

Drawbacks:

  • High User Friction
  • Post-Mix Hygiene is Difficult
  • Centralization Risk
  • Liveness Requirements

Ring Signatures

Primary implementation: Monero (XMR), Zano

How it works:

  • Hides the true sender by mixing their signature with a number of “decoys” (past transaction outputs)
  • An observer can verify that one of the participants is the true sender but can’t tell who

Problem with decoy-based systems

  • You’re adding “noise” to real transactions
  • Decent privacy, but against an attacker with access to other records might be able to figure it out
  • An active attacker who floods the network with their own transactions can reduce the anonymity guarantees (because they know their own transactions)
  • The more repeated transactions you perform, the more you are exposing yourself

Shows an example of an overseer attack where they track repeat customers

Shows an example of a tainted dust attack where someone can see where money is spent/going

Mimblewimble

Pioneered by: Grin, Beam | Adopted by: Litecoin

How it works:

  • Encrypts all amounts
  • Uses aggregation techniques
  • Leverages “cut-through”, where intermediate transactions are removed to reduce the blockchain size

Analysis:

  • Privacy: Hides sender, receiver, and amounts well, but weaker on transaction graph privacy
  • Usability: new implementation is non-interactive, a great leap forward
  • Niche: Great middle ground for chains wanting lightweight privacy

zkSNARKs: Cutting Edge

  • Concept: Zero-Knowledge proofs allow a user to prove a statement is true without revealing the underlying information.

Orchard (Current Cash)

  • No trusted setup
  • Slower performance than Sapling
  • Halo2 allows for recursive proofs

Tachyon

Lelantus Spark

Primary implementation: Firo, (Seraphis?)

How it works:

  • A modular design that avoids monolithic, complex ZK circuits
  • Uses a combination of specialized, well-understood cryptographic proofs for each task
    • One-out-of-many proofs
    • Bulletproofs

Analysis:

  • Much simpler to design, audit, maintain, and upgrade
  • Flexibility: Can be extended to support confidential assets

FCMP++

Primary implementation: Monero

How it works:

  • Maintains Monero’s existing address structure but enables full view support

Analysis:

  • Global anonymity set and still much simpler than Zcash’s circuits.  No trusted setup.
  • Proceeding to Alpha testate soon.

Network Layer Privacy

Don’t forget the network layer!

  • Even with perfect on-chain cryptography, your privacy is incomplete if your IP address is exposed
  • Broadcasting a transaction from your home IP address links your on-chain activity to your real-world identity.

Solutions:

  • Tor
  • Dandelion
  • Mixnets

Bridging the Gap: Compliance Tools

Strong privacy doesn’t have to mean zero compliance.  Modern privacy tech includes tools for selective disclosure.

View keys: Grant read-only access to an auditor, regulator, or business partner to view your transaction history without giving them spending authority.

Transparent addresses

Privacy pools

AVOID backdoors!

Challenges for privacy projects:

  • Regulatory: Pressure from regulators
  • Technical: Much harder to build things
  • Delistings: Constant threat to delist the coin

What do exchanges want?

  • Volume and interest
  • Satisfy regulators
  • Ease of compliance

The art of stealth privacy

  • Smart branding: Don’t call yourself a privacy coin
  • Architectural separation
  • Extension blocks: Make privacy optional
  • No protocol privacy but app privacy
  • Controlled interaction: design the ecosystem so exchanges only ever interact with transparent addresses—shielded funds are unshielded before deposit
  • Lean on the ecosystem: Allow third-party mixers and services to distance it from direct responsibility on the core protocol

Exchange tolerance

  • Stealth addressing: Needs return function for exchanges uncomfortable with certain funds.
  • Shielded exchange interaction: As long as exchanges don’t directly touch shielded assets, it reduces their risk.
  • Hiding amounts: This is a gray area, but projects are moving forward (e.g., Dash).

MWEB for eCash?

  • Soft fork
  • Proven in practice
  • Lightweight
  • Opt-in

Q&A

eCash is doing a privacy subnet, what would be appropriate for us?

Discusses Zcash’s Sapling

Categorized in:

POW