Over the past several months, the Ethereum Classic community has engaged in one of its most important discussions since the 2016 DAO fork: how to sustainably fund the critical software and infrastructure that keeps the network alive. The result is Olympia — a coordinated suite of four proposals (ECIPs 1111–1114) that together form ETC’s first protocol-native, open, and permissionless treasury.
With the drafts now strengthened through multiple rounds of feedback and revisions, Olympia is moving into its next stage: testnet deployment on Mordor.
Ethereum Classic’s core infrastructure — including Core-Geth, block explorers, RPC endpoints, and critical security updates — has historically relied on centralized subsidies. While these arrangements have kept ETC running, they are fragile and unsustainable. Since 2016, core developers and community members have debated how to secure long-term funding without sacrificing decentralization.
Olympia directly addresses this challenge. Instead of burning the BASEFEE as in Ethereum’s EIP-1559, Olympia redirects it to an on-chain treasury contract. Importantly, miner rewards remain intact. This creates a sustainable, transparent funding source while preserving ETC’s Proof-of-Work incentives and immutability.
Olympia’s rollout will begin on the Mordor testnet with:
Subsequent testing will expand to:
Testing may use real-world proposals modeled on current ETC Cooperative funding bills. This approach highlights how critical infrastructure is funded today — and how Olympia will replace these centralized mechanisms with a decentralized, on-chain system once it activates.
Olympia’s architecture emphasizes compatibility, sustainability, and minimal disruption:
This design ensures that any opposition can simply continue using legacy transactions, reducing the risk of contention.
Community response to Olympia has been broadly positive. Across GitHub, Discord, Telegram, Twitter, and CMC, Olympia-related content has surpassed 500,000 impressions, reflecting strong awareness and engagement.
Because Olympia is additive, opt-in, and backwards-compatible, the likelihood of a contentious hard fork is very low. Even those who abstain from using Type-2 transactions will still benefit from the public goods the system funds: Core-Geth maintenance, CVE security patches, RPC endpoints, explorers, and essential developer infrastructure.
In practice, stakeholders across the ecosystem — from mining pools and exchanges to hardware manufacturers, dapp developers, and end users — all depend on a maintained Core-Geth. Olympia aligns incentives by ensuring this shared need is sustainably met.
Ethereum Classic is not alone in experimenting with decentralized funding. Olympia draws lessons from the broader EVM ecosystem, including:
By adapting proven mechanisms into a protocol-native, opt-in model, Olympia preserves ETC’s distinct principles: immutability, Proof-of-Work security, and credible neutrality.
Olympia is expected to activate on mainnet by 2027, following successful testnet trials and ECIP progression. In the early stages, businesses operating around ETC are expected to seed the treasury, with growing Type-2 transaction adoption ensuring long-term self-sustainability.
For Ethereum Classic, Olympia represents the culmination of nearly a decade of discussion on funding. From the early 17,300 ETC community donation in 2016 to today’s ECIP-structured proposals, ETC has continually sought to secure its infrastructure while protecting its core values. Olympia now offers a durable, decentralized solution.
By EthereumClassic
about 4 hours ago
