The Olympia Upgrade

Olympia is coordinated by the same developers, organizations, and community stewards who have delivered every Ethereum Classic network upgrade since 2016: Gotham, Die Hard, Defuse Difficulty Bomb, Thanos, and the full EVM compatibility series spanning Gas Reprice, Atlantis, Agharta, Phoenix, Magneto, Mystique, and Spiral. The ETC Cooperative, a US 501(c)(3) non-profit, funds Ethereum Classic's client development teams and has managed the hard fork coordination process throughout that history. Stakeholder outreach, client release sequencing, and cross-client testing are all established practice. Olympia is a significant upgrade carried forward by a team with a clean delivery record across a decade of ETC network upgrades.

The ETC Cooperative is a US 501(c)(3) non-profit that has funded Ethereum Classic's core client development for years, contributing millions of dollars to the network's client teams and infrastructure through every upgrade cycle. Every hard fork, every client release, and every cross-client coordination effort has been backed by their balance sheet. Olympia is what they were building toward: a protocol-native funding model that does not depend on any single organization's continued generosity. The Olympia Treasury, governed on-chain by Ethereum Classic's Olympia DAO, extends beyond institutional dependency to a durable financial foundation that scales with network usage. The model changes, not the commitment. The ETC Cooperative continues as an active steward, and any developer, mining operation, hardware manufacturer, or individual worldwide can contribute directly on-chain without fielding a team or managing a non-profit to do it.

Grayscale launched the Grayscale Ethereum Classic Trust (ETCG) in 2018, years before Bitcoin ETFs existed as a product category, and became a major institutional donor to the ETC Cooperative, indirectly funding the network's core client development at a time when no other investment product issuer was doing anything comparable. What Grayscale was practicing on Ethereum Classic in 2018 is now a recognized trend: ETF issuers funding protocol development, corporate treasury strategies reinvesting in network ecosystems. Taking that model on-chain is only possible on Ethereum Classic because ETC is the only Proof-of-Work blockchain with native smart contracts. Olympia DAO makes it permissionless, opening a direct on-chain contribution path to every holder, whether through ETCG, a direct wallet, or any future investment product.

ECIP-1121 closes years of EVM divergence in a single upgrade, delivering the execution-layer improvements from Dencun, Pectra, and Fusaka that are independent of Proof-of-Stake and blob data availability, and carrying that work into Glamsterdam. Before Olympia, ETC lagged behind on these EIPs, creating real friction for developers deploying across EVM chains. After Olympia, Solidity 0.8.x, Foundry, Hardhat, wagmi, viem, and ethers.js all work on ETC without modification, patching, or ETC-specific overrides. One codebase deploys to every EVM chain. ETC could not credibly claim full tooling compatibility before Olympia. After Olympia, it can.

Two contracts, in that order. On Ethereum a transaction's base fee is destroyed — the burned half of what every transaction pays — while the priority-fee tip goes to the block producer. Ethereum Classic has no base fee today at all: EIP-1559 is not active here, so the component does not exist rather than being zero. ECIP-1111 introduces it and credits it at block finalization to the Olympia Sovereignty Vault instead of burning it. A 1 gwei floor keeps that revenue from decaying to zero at low utilization. The Vault holds nothing for long: sweep() forwards its whole balance to a TimelockController, which is the Olympia Treasury, and that is where funds sit until a passed proposal releases them. The base fee is not the transaction fee — a transaction pays base fee plus a priority-fee tip, and tips and ECIP-1017 block rewards are untouched by the whole suite. Both contracts also accept ordinary transfers from any address, so exchanges, custodians, miners, investment product issuers, and institutions can contribute on-chain with no overhead. Stakeholders who prefer a traditional giving model can contribute through the ETC Cooperative, a US 501(c)(3) non-profit that accepts tax-deductible donations.

Because the address consensus commits to can only change by hard fork, and governance has to be able to change without one. Wiring a permanent address straight into a governance stack makes every component that address transitively commits to permanent as well. So the network makes the smallest possible thing permanent: a contract with no owner, no role, no setter and no parameter, whose entire behavior is to receive value and forward it unchanged to one immutable destination. Everything mutable — the Governor, the Timelock, CoreNFT, the sanctions oracle, the OFP Registry — lives strictly downstream and is replaceable by ordinary governance. Exactly one contract in Olympia is permanent, and it is the Vault. That asymmetry is what makes the Treasury replaceable, and it is the single largest structural gain in the design.

Mordor first. Mordor is Ethereum Classic's Proof-of-Work testnet and mirrors mainnet conditions closely, and cross-client state-transition equivalence must be demonstrated there before a mainnet activation block is scheduled. The mainnet block is set only after Mordor has run cleanly and network stakeholders — exchanges, custodians, mining pools, node operators and infrastructure providers — have confirmed readiness, and client releases are published well ahead of it. That sequence is the same one used for every previous ETC hard fork.

ECIP-1017 block rewards and priority-fee tips are untouched by the whole Olympia suite. Two things are worth separating. At the minimum gas price, the Vault's gwei is new cost borne by the sender rather than a transfer out of miner revenue, and ECIP-1122's 1 gwei minimum miner tip makes the floor beneath the miner enforceable for the first time — today it is 1 wei by client default, with 1 gwei being a wallet convention rather than anything enforced. Above the floor, at a fixed total gas price, one gwei does move from the miner to the Vault. How large a share of fee income that is depends on the prevailing tip, and what bounds it is that fee income of either kind is small against ECIP-1017 subsidies at Ethereum Classic's measured utilization.

It stops following the canonical chain at the activation block, as with any consensus change. Recovering means upgrading the client and resyncing from the fork point. Exchanges, wallets, RPC providers, and services running outdated clients cannot process transactions on the post-Olympia chain. Client release announcements are published well in advance to give operators time to upgrade.

Olympia strengthens ETC's regulatory profile. As a Proof-of-Work blockchain with no pre-mine, no ICO, no foundation controlling the protocol, and now a community-governed on-chain treasury, ETC is positioned for classification as a digital commodity under the CLARITY Act. In the EU, ETC qualifies as a decentralized asset under MiCA, exempt from per-asset issuer requirements. Japan's FSA lists ETC among approved digital assets. UK and UAE regulatory frameworks treat Proof-of-Work assets with distinct treatment from staking-based networks. The three-layer governance structure of protocol clients, Wyoming DAO LLC, and the on-chain Olympia DAO maintains clear decentralization while satisfying compliance requirements at the legal entity layer. The network remains decentralized, and governance is open to any qualified participant worldwide.

In the unlikely event of a critical issue after activation, the same client teams that have managed every ETC emergency response since 2016 coordinate a patch release. The established stakeholder communication channels, including the ETC Cooperative, client maintainers, and major exchange contacts, are the same ones used for every previous upgrade, and the Mordor run provides a real network validation environment before mainnet activation. One thing is worth stating plainly rather than overclaimed: the clients carrying this work are forks maintained by the specification's own authoring team, so agreement between them shows the rule runs, not that four teams read the specification the same way. Cross-client test vectors are what convert that into independent confirmation.