Connect to Alphanet

Fork of mainnet with PoW difficulty reset — the ECX alpha network. The native currency is eCash (ECX). It runs real BIP300/301 rules, and PoW difficulty is set very low, so it is possible to mine this chain at home.

Network endpoints

seed.alpha.ecash.ninja:8533

A full Alphanet node: the peer you sync from.

eca5a104

P2P network magic — Alphanet defines its own, so a stock Bitcoin client never completes a handshake with it.

explorer.alpha.ecash.ninja

Block explorer (mempool.space)

esplora.alpha.ecash.ninja

Esplora REST API, for querying Alphanet programmatically — e.g. /blocks/tip/height or /address/<addr>/utxo.

ssl://explorer.alpha.ecash.ninja:50002

Electrum server (TLS). Point an Electrum wallet at it to hold ECX without running a node.

https://data.drivechain.dev/alphanet/utxo-935000.dat

UTXO snapshot, to skip the historical download entirely — see below.

Run a node

Download a prebuilt Alphanet node, or build it from ecash-com/bitcoin (alphanet branch). Then connect to the network:

macOS (Apple Silicon)macOS (Intel)Linux (x86_64)Windows (x86_64)

bitcoind -datadir=./alphanet -addnode=seed.alpha.ecash.ninja:8533

⚠️ Always pass -datadir: because the fork identifies as main, running without it would write into a real ~/.bitcoin directory.

A full sync downloads and validates all of mainnet history up to the fork (~850 GB, several hours). For a much faster start, use the UTXO snapshot below.

Binaries for everything else (BitWindow, sidechains, the BIP300/301 enforcer) are at releases.drivechain.info.

Fast bootstrap (UTXO snapshot)

The client ships an assumeutxo commitment for block 935,000, so you can load a ~9 GB snapshot and be validating Alphanet blocks at the tip within minutes. Historical blocks backfill in the background.

curl -O https://data.drivechain.dev/alphanet/utxo-935000.dat
echo "922ccc7ae0ebf23fbff674e12e295265c9958ecfb0a5da729341b50319ae73cc  utxo-935000.dat" | shasum -a 256 --check

bitcoind -daemon -datadir=./alphanet -addnode=seed.alpha.ecash.ninja:8533
bitcoin-cli -datadir=./alphanet -rpcclienttimeout=0 \
  loadtxoutset "$PWD/utxo-935000.dat"

Pass an absolute path to loadtxoutset: bitcoind resolves relative paths against its own datadir, not your shell’s working directory, so the bare filename would fail with Couldn’t open file … for reading.

The snapshot is verified against a hash committed in the client’s chainparams. Expect the background history sync to eventually use the full ~850 GB of disk.

Mining

stratum+tcp://pool.alpha.avonpool.xyz:3334

Point a stratum miner at the public pool. See pool.alpha.avonpool.xyz for stats and setup instructions.