Revenue Impact
Olympia would change fee handling, not block rewards. Here is what miners would keep.
Block Reward
1.6384 ETC
Era 6, unchanged by Olympia
Uncle Reward
Standard
No changes to uncle reward structure
Base Fee Impact
At most 0.0091%
All fees together were this share of miner revenue over the last 30 days
Priority Fee
Kept by miners
The part of each fee above the base fee would go directly to the miner
Why Fees Matter to Miners
Miner revenue has two parts: the block reward and transaction fees. The block reward falls 20% every 5,000,000 blocks under ECIP-1017: 1.6384 ETC in era 6, 1.31072 ETC in era 7, and 0.67108864 ETC in era 10.
In a healthy fee market, rising fee income offsets the falling block reward as the network grows. Bitcoin is designed to work this way: fees take over as the block subsidy falls.
On Ethereum Classic, fees were 0.0091% of miner revenue over the last 30 days. Network fees →
Without fee revenue, the long-term security of a Proof-of-Work chain rests on a subsidy scheduled to shrink. Miners leave a network that cannot pay them, and a network without miners has no Proof-of-Work security.
The Funding Problem
Fee revenue grows when the network is used, and use grows with funded development: maintained clients, EVM upgrades, tooling, and support for the builders who deploy on Ethereum Classic.
That development has depended on organizations funded by donors and grants, with no guaranteed continuity. The ETC Cooperative funded client development for years and is winding down. When funding stops, development slows, builders go elsewhere, and blocks stay empty.
Miners have kept the chain secure throughout. They are economic actors, and the current model pays them a block reward that shrinks on a fixed schedule, with nothing that grows fee revenue.
Olympia's Answer
Olympia would add the EIP-1559 base fee to Ethereum Classic and credit it to the Olympia Treasury instead of burning it, as Ethereum does. Treasury income would be small while blocks are nearly empty, and would grow with use of the network.
Olympia DAO would fund development from it by on-chain proposals: client maintenance, network security, infrastructure and ecosystem growth, paid for by the network's own use rather than by donations.
Fee Flow After Olympia
The Flywheel
A funded protocol would create a self-reinforcing loop, each step enabling the next.
- 1
Funded development
Olympia DAO would fund client maintenance and ecosystem programs from the Treasury, by proposals its members vote on.
- 2
More applications
Funded development attracts builders, and their applications bring users.
- 3
More transactions
Active applications generate activity on-chain, and blocks start to fill.
- 4
More fee revenue
More transactions would pay more base fee to the Treasury and more priority fees to miners.
- 5
More miners
Higher total revenue makes mining more profitable, and hashrate grows.
- 6
More security
Higher hashrate raises the cost of a 51% attack, and trust in the network grows.
- 7
More trust
A secure, active network draws institutional use and more builders.
The Miner's Stake
Block rewards would be unchanged, and priority fees would go to miners. The base fee, which Ethereum burns, would pay for the development that brings use, and with it fee revenue, to Ethereum Classic.
Under Olympia, every transaction would pay a base fee to the Treasury and a priority fee to the miner who includes it. A network whose transaction volume stays flat while its block reward keeps falling has no long-term security model.
Olympia would tie the funding of Ethereum Classic's development to the interests of the miners who secure it.
Paying Miners From Base-Fee Revenue
Two further ECIPs concern paying miners from that revenue, and neither changes the Olympia fork. ECIP-1115 would do it through ordinary funding proposals, spreading the base fees each block raised over a window of blocks. No base fee is redirected by it, and nothing is owed to anyone until a proposal passes.
ECIP-1116 would pay a smoothed share at the consensus layer instead. It is a separate hard fork after Olympia, scheduled only after a smoothing curve has been demonstrated through ECIP-1115.