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 the Olympia DAO and executed by the Wyoming DAO LLC, extends beyond institutional dependency with 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 now 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 with eth/70 and the deterministic CREATE2 factory. 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.

The Olympia Treasury is funded by EIP-1559 basefee revenue, credited to it at block finalization. Contributions beyond that are voluntary and take two forms: sending ETC to the address, or mining to it — a miner naming the Treasury as their coinbase recipient is donating hashpower rather than currency. The protocol directs the basefee and nothing else; miner block rewards are never touched. The vault sits at the treasury address. Block rewards and tips remain completely untouched and go entirely to miners. The basefee is a value that would otherwise be destroyed and has never been part of miner compensation. This creates sustainable, transparent funding without inflation or any impact on miner income.

No. Block rewards and tips remain completely untouched. Olympia redirects the EIP-1559 basefee to the protocol treasury. The basefee is a value that would otherwise be destroyed and has never been part of miner compensation. Miner revenue is unchanged.

Olympia activates on the Mordor testnet first. Mordor is Ethereum Classic's Proof-of-Work testnet and mirrors mainnet conditions closely. Multiple independent client implementations run the Mordor fork before any mainnet activation is scheduled. Cross-client validation using the Hive integration testing framework confirms consensus compatibility across implementations. The mainnet activation block is not set until Mordor has run cleanly and major network stakeholders, including exchanges, custodians, and mining pools, have confirmed readiness.

Olympia is targeted for mainnet activation in 2027. Olympia activates on Mordor testnet first. The mainnet activation block is announced after a successful Mordor run and a coordinated stakeholder readiness check with exchanges, mining pools, node operators, and infrastructure providers. All client implementations publish Olympia-compatible releases well before activation.

Governance operates on two layers, and only one of them is binding. The Olympia DAO makes the binding decisions — security maintenance, EVM parity, client funding, and treasury allocation — using non-transferable membership NFTs, with members casting on-chain votes during a defined voting period via the OpenZeppelin Governor 5.x contract suite. Futarchy prediction markets (ECIP-1117/1118) are an open signal layer on top: anyone can stake on proposal outcomes without membership, producing a financially-backed public signal that informs the vote rather than determining it or executing anything. They run as a Child-DAO under ECIP-1113 §6, funded by executed funding proposals rather than a direct basefee share.

Nodes that are not upgraded before the activation block will stop following the canonical chain. You will need to upgrade your client and resync from the fork point. Exchanges, wallets, RPC providers, and services running outdated clients will be unable to process transactions on the post-Olympia chain. Client release announcements are published well in advance to give operators time to upgrade.

In the unlikely event of a critical issue after activation, the same client teams that have managed every ETC emergency response since 2016 would coordinate a patch release promptly. The established stakeholder communication channels, including the ETC Cooperative, client maintainers, and major exchange contacts, are the same ones used for every previous upgrade. Olympia has broader test coverage across more independent client implementations than any previous ETC hard fork, and the Mordor testnet run provides a real network validation environment before mainnet activation.