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| Round | Amount | Valuation | Date | Source | Investor |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Seed | $ 3M | -- | Dec 20, 2022 | -- | -- |
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About LayerTwo Labs
LayerTwo Labs develops Drivechain, a Bitcoin sidechain design expressed as BIP-300 and BIP-301 plus reference implementations. BIP-300 sets the hashrate escrow and withdrawal mechanism between mainchain and sidechains: sidechain blocks are produced by blind merged mining, and withdrawals require mainchain miners to approve them across a hashrate window. BIP-301 lets miners collect sidechain fees without running sidechain nodes. The aim is to host smart contracts, private transactions, asset issuance and prediction markets on sidechains with independent rules while leaving Bitcoin's base-layer script untouched, with security still drawn from mainchain hashrate.
It sits in the consensus-change wing of Bitcoin scaling, distinct from Lightning or federated sidechains in pushing new features onto separately governed chains while anchoring safety to mainchain hashrate. Withdrawals depend on sustained miner voting, so concentrated hashrate or low turnout weakens the certainty of the exit path, which is the core of the dispute that has kept the proposal unmerged. In April 2026 the team announced a hard fork, eCash, to activate both proposals directly, and on 19 September 2026 opened Betanet at Bitcoin block 967,680.
LayerTwo Labs, founded by Paul Sztorc, focuses on Bitcoin sidechain solutions via Drivechain (BIP300/301). Key milestones:
2015: Sztorc published the Drivechain concept on his blog.
2017: BIP300 (hashrate escrow) and BIP301 (blind merge mining) were formally proposed, forming the technical foundation.
2018: BIPs officially submitted to the Bitcoin community.
2019: First BIP300 sidechain created.
2022: Raised $3M seed funding; ETH sidechain launched; total sidechains reached four.
2023: Planned hard fork to launch Mainchain (BTC 2.0) with seven sidechains, including Thunder, zSide, and BitNames.
2025: Donald Trump Jr. joined as strategic advisor, boosting Drivechain's visibility.
These milestones mark the evolution from concept to implementation, aiming to enhance Bitcoin scalability and interoperability without altering its core principles.
On April 24, 2026 LayerTwo Labs chief executive Paul Sztorc said he would stop waiting for community consensus and push out eCash (ECX), a hard fork with Drivechain built in, allocating ECX 1:1 to BTC holders. On August 7 the schedule became three stages: an alpha at block height 963,648 on August 23, a beta at 967,680 on September 20, and the permanent launch at 973,728 on October 31, the eighteenth anniversary of the Bitcoin white paper. Tokens from the preliminary phases are to be destroyed and exchangeable for real ECX.
LayerTwo Labs' new chain nearly replicates Bitcoin Core, keeps SHA-256 and the 21 million cap, and activates BIP300 and BIP301 so miners manage sidechain deposits and withdrawals by hash-power signalling. Seven sidechains are in development, covering privacy transactions, the Truthcoin prediction market, the CoinShift exchange, BitAssets for NFTs, BitNames for identity and the quantum-resistant Photon. The contested part is the reassignment of up to half of roughly 1.1 million early coins attributed to Satoshi to fund developers and early investors, which critics such as Jameson Lopp call outrage marketing.
LayerTwo Labs stabilises block production on the permanent chain, ships the sidechains one by one, adds miner revenue through merge mining, and completes replay protection and coin-splitting tools.
Paul Sztorc — Founder & CEO; prominent Bitcoin researcher and author of the Drivechains BIPs 300/301, formerly Director of Research at Tierion.
CryptAxe — Bitcoin Core contributor and founding team member. Austin Alexander — 8-year Kraken veteran and founding team member.
Nikita Chashchinskii — Co-Founder & Software Engineer.