Skip to main content

Olympia

What Olympia is, and how it works

Ethereum Classic is adopting the fee market Ethereum has run since 2021, with one change: the part Ethereum destroys, Olympia keeps. It goes to a vault the network owns, to pay for the network’s own core development, infrastructure and security. This page is the whole framework in one place, and every part of it opens onto a page that goes further.

How Olympia fits together

Follow the money. One transaction pays it, one contract holds it, three layers decide what happens to it, and it leaves as work someone did for Ethereum Classic.

  1. In

    Every transaction pays a base fee

    Olympia brings Ethereum Classic the fee market Ethereum has run since 2021. A transaction pays a base fee that the network sets, plus a tip on top of it. Ethereum destroys the base fee. Olympia instead credits it to a contract of its own. That crediting happens in consensus as each block is finalized, with no transaction involved.

    Where the money comes from

    Tips and block rewards leave here

    They are paid to miners in full, exactly as they are today, and block rewards follow the same schedule they follow now. The base fee is the only part Olympia moves.

  2. Credited

    Permanent

    One contract is permanent, and it is this one

    Consensus credits a single address, written into every Olympia client. The contract there is the Olympia Sovereignty Vault, and it is deliberately almost nothing: no owner, no role, no setter, no parameter. Its whole behavior is to receive value and forward it, unchanged, to one address fixed when it was built. Nothing in governance can change that address, and moving it would take a hard fork. This is the only permanent contract in the system, and that single boundary is what the rest of the design is built around.

    Where it goes, and who owns it

  3. Held

    Replaceable

    The Treasury is what holds the money

    The address the Vault forwards to is the Olympia Treasury, a stock timelock contract owned by no company, foundation or individual. It does not invest the balance and it does not choose who receives anything. Everything from here down is replaceable by ordinary governance, the Treasury included. One qualification: because the Vault's destination is fixed, a replacement Treasury is funded by the current one forwarding to it, rather than by pointing the revenue somewhere new.

    Where it goes, and who owns it

  4. Decided

    Three layers stand between the Treasury and a payment

    Nothing reaches a recipient without clearing all three of them, in order, on-chain, and where anyone at all can watch it happen.

    1. Propose

      Submitting a funding proposal is open. There is no application to fill in, no affiliation to hold, and no gatekeeper to satisfy. The one bar is a proposal threshold the DAO sets for itself, which it can raise or lower through the same process as anything else.

      Who decides how it is spent

    2. Decide

      Core contributors vote. A vote comes from a CoreNFT, which is earned by contributing and by nothing else: it cannot be bought, sold, lent or delegated, and one address carries one vote however many tokens exist. Open prediction markets run alongside the vote, pricing what Ethereum Classic is worth with a proposal accepted against what it is worth with the same proposal rejected. They decide grant allocation for a season Olympia DAO has seeded: the contributors settle whether and how much, and the market settles to whom.

      What stops it being captured

    3. Release

      An approved proposal is queued and waits out a fixed delay in public before anything moves. The Treasury then pays it out itself, and only the Governor can tell it to: no other account holds that permission. On the way through, the Governor checks the payment's target against a sanctions oracle and reverts if the target is listed or if no oracle has been attached.

      Who cannot receive it

  5. Out

    Core development, critical infrastructure, network security

    Those are the purposes the Treasury exists for. Which of them receives what is not the Treasury's decision and not any one party's. It is whatever the proposals passed, one at a time, on the record.

    What the DAO funds

The five stages

Olympia arrives in five stages, and the difference between them matters more than the order does. Two change the rules every node enforces, so they need a hard fork and everybody upgrades. The other three do not, and cannot.

Each fork stage takes an activation block settled by open coordination. Mordor first, then mainnet.

  1. 01 Consensus Upgrades

    Hard fork

    Client and consensus changes activate, and consensus begins crediting the Olympia Sovereignty Vault, which was deployed and audited well before this block. It keeps nothing and forwards what it receives to the Olympia Treasury. Nothing can spend that revenue yet, because the Governor's execution gate fails closed until the sanctions oracle is bound.

    ECIP-1111 · ECIP-1112 · ECIP-1121 · ECIP-1122

  2. 02 Core Governance

    No forkGovernance goes live

    The contracts that vote and hold the money are already on-chain. What happens at this stage is binding the sanctions oracle and the proposal registry, after which the DAO can spend. Those two attach through a setter rather than being built into anything, so they may be deployed on either side of the fork, and revenue accrues unspendably until the oracle is bound.

    ECIP-1113 · ECIP-1114 · ECIP-1119

  3. 03 Prediction Markets

    No forkContract deployment

    The market contracts deploy, paid for by a funding proposal that the second stage's DAO passes. These contracts hold and release funds themselves, so ECIP-1119 puts the sanctions check inside them rather than upstream. That is an obligation on whoever writes them, and it is not met until they are written and audited.

    ECIP-1117 · ECIP-1118

  4. 04 Treasury Distribution

    No forkGovernance activation

    A candidate curve for returning part of the base fee to miners runs at the contract layer, on funds the Treasury already holds. Its fraction, its window and its shape are all set through the proposal process, so a wrong number costs a proposal rather than a fork.

    ECIP-1115

  5. 05 Protocol Integration

    Hard fork

    The curve the previous stage demonstrated is written into block finalization. The protocol pays it directly instead of disbursing it, and the payment path leaves governance entirely. It cannot activate until real production data justifies the number it hardens.

    ECIP-1116

The three stages in the middle are not forks. They deploy contracts and run governance on a chain whose rules are already settled, so no node can end up disagreeing with any other over them. Reading the roadmap as five forks is the first misreading this sequence is drawn to prevent.

The second is reading it as a build order. Staging is a rollout schedule, not a deployment mechanism: every contract the first fork commits to is deployed, audited and readable on-chain before that block, so the audit window sits in front of the fork rather than in a gap after it. Two pieces sit deliberately outside that set, the sanctions oracle and the proposal registry, and either may be deployed on either side of the fork because each attaches through a setter rather than being built into anything. What arrives later is the ability to spend, not the code. Each stage still depends only on the stages before it, and the last cannot arrive until the fourth has produced the evidence that it hardens into consensus.

What ships at the first forkWhat the last two stages are for

The framework, question by question

Seven questions a reader actually has, one page each, answered from the specifications that define the answer rather than from a summary of them.

  1. 01Where the money comes fromA base fee on every transaction, set by the network and paid by whoever sends it. Ethereum destroys that fee. Olympia keeps it. Block rewards and miner tips are not touched.ECIP-1111 · ECIP-1122
  2. 02Where it goes, and who owns itConsensus credits one permanent contract, which keeps nothing and forwards every unit to the Olympia Treasury. The Treasury holds the money and has one withdrawal path, no admin key, and no company or individual behind it.ECIP-1112 · ECIP-1113
  3. 03Who decides how it is spentSubmission is permissionless, bounded only by a governance-set threshold. Core contributors vote, each holding one vote that cannot be bought, sold, lent or delegated. An approved payment leaves the Treasury by one route and no other, and only the Governor can trigger it.ECIP-1113 · ECIP-1114
  4. 04What stops it being capturedOpen markets price Ethereum Classic under a proposal accepted against the same proposal rejected. A position pays in proportion to being right, so the price carries information a poll cannot. Olympia DAO decides whether and how much to seed a season, and the market then settles the allocation independently.ECIP-1117 · ECIP-1118
  5. 05Who cannot receive itTreasury money cannot reach a sanctioned address. The binding check runs inside the Governor at the moment of execution, and because no other account is able to release Treasury funds, there is no route around it.ECIP-1119
  6. 06What happens to miners when the subsidy runs outEthereum Classic's block subsidy shrinks on a fixed schedule, so something has to replace it. Olympia does not guess what: it runs a candidate where a mistake costs a proposal, and hardens only what production has demonstrated.ECIP-1017 · ECIP-1115 · ECIP-1116
  7. 07What ships at the forkThe execution layer catches up with Ethereum's, leaving out Proof-of-Stake and blob data. Three network settings that every Olympia client is required to enforce identically come with it.ECIP-1121 · ECIP-1122