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On-chain governance for Ethereum Classic

The Olympia Upgrade

Ethereum Classic runs the fee market the rest of the EVM world runs on, with one change. Ethereum destroys the base fee on every transaction. Ethereum Classic keeps it, in a permanent contract the network owns, paying for the developers, infrastructure and security the chain depends on. Miners keep their block rewards and priority tips, undiminished.

How it works

The money moves one way

Four steps, each specified by its own ECIP, and no step can be skipped or reversed. Nothing along the path holds an admin key, and no payment leaves without an approval recorded publicly beforehand.

  1. 01ECIP-1111

    Every transaction pays a base fee

    The network sets it, the sender pays it, and it is credited inside consensus as each block is finalized. Priority tips and ECIP-1017 block rewards go to whoever produced the block, in full and unconditionally.

  2. 02ECIP-1112

    It lands in the Olympia Sovereignty Vault

    One permanent address, written into every Olympia client, with no owner, no role, no setter and no parameter. It keeps nothing: whatever arrives is forwarded, unchanged, to a single address fixed when the contract was built. This is the only contract that cannot be replaced without a hard fork.

  3. 03ECIP-1113

    It lives in the Olympia Treasury

    A stock timelock owned by no company, foundation or individual. It does not invest the balance and does not choose who receives anything. One account can tell it to pay, and that account carries out proposals that were voted through, queued in public, and held for a fixed delay.

  4. 04ECIP-1114 · ECIP-1117

    Proposals decide where it goes

    Olympia DAO votes on the network's core: clients, network security, critical infrastructure. A proposal may instead seed a season for the Olympia Futarchy Grants DAO, which allocates that sum to public ecosystem work by open market rather than by committee.

The whole framework, question by question

Governance

Three systems that work together, and no single group controls the protocol. Binding on-chain governance, open prediction markets and network adoption each depend on the other two.

Learn about Olympia governance →

Binding On-Chain Protocol Governance

Core contributors vote on treasury allocation, core client funding, and protocol upgrades. Every proposal is submitted, voted on, queued and executed on-chain, and every step is publicly verifiable.

Open Prediction Markets

Anyone holding ETC or Classic USD can take a position, with no membership and no CoreNFT. Olympia DAO decides whether and how much to seed a grants season; the market decides who is funded out of it.

Network Participant Layer

Miners, exchanges, wallets and node operators govern through the client software they run. An upgrade activates only when the network adopts it.

Dev 0.1

On-Chain Architecture

Six contracts, and the boundary between the first two is the whole design. Base-fee revenue lands at a permanent address that keeps nothing and forwards everything; it lives in a timelock that pays only what governance approved. Everything below that first contract is replaceable by ordinary proposal, with no hard fork and nobody’s permission.

ECIP-1112OlympiaSovereigntyVault
The permanent address consensus credits. Holds nothing for long: it forwards its balance, unchanged, to the Treasury
ECIP-1113 §1.3TimelockController
The Olympia Treasury. Holds the funds and carries out approved proposals after a mandatory delay
ECIP-1113OlympiaGovernor
Proposal lifecycle, vote tallying, and the execution-time compliance gate. The only account that can tell the Treasury to pay
ECIP-1113 §1.2CoreNFT
Soulbound membership. One non-delegable vote per core contributor, minted only by a passed proposal
ECIP-1119SanctionsOracle
The list the Governor screens every outward address against before the Treasury releases anything
ECIP-1114OFPRegistry
Funding-proposal metadata, bound to the proposal that executes it so voters read what runs