What a transaction pays
A transaction buys room in a block, and room is priced in gas. Under the fee market Ethereum has run since 2021, that price comes in two parts. The network sets a base fee that applies to everyone in the block, and the sender adds a tip on top of it for whoever produces that block. Ethereum destroys the base fee and pays the tip to the miner.
Ethereum Classic does not have a base fee at all today. That fee market has never been active here, so the component does not exist rather than sitting at zero. Nothing on Ethereum Classic is being burned or thrown away that Olympia then redirects. Olympia creates the base fee, and in the same change decides where it goes.
| Per unit of gas | Today | Under Olympia | Goes to |
|---|---|---|---|
| Base fee | Does not exist | At least 1 gwei | The Treasury |
| Miner tip | 1 wei enforced, around 1 gwei by convention | At least 1 gwei | The miner |
| Least a transaction can pay | 1 wei | 2 gwei | Split between them |
What that costs in practice
A plain transfer consumes 21,000 gas, so a two gwei minimum puts the cheapest possible transfer at 0.000042 ETC. What people actually pay today is about one gwei, which puts the same transfer at 0.000021 ETC. The floor doubles a very small number. Against what clients technically permit it is a far larger multiple, and that gap is deliberate: it is friction at spam scale and nothing at human scale.
Two gwei is what a conformant network charges
It is not a promise the protocol can keep on its own. Only the base fee floor is a consensus rule that every node checks. The tip floor is a client setting, so a block producer that declines to enforce it can still include cheaper transactions. One gwei is the part that holds regardless. The operator detail is on the upgrade page.
What changes under Olympia
Two upstream Ethereum changes switch on: the fee market itself, and an instruction that lets a contract read the current base fee. Both have been in production on Ethereum since 2021 and across most of the EVM ecosystem since. Ethereum Classic adopts both of them as written, with a single deliberate exception.
The difference is the destination. Where Ethereum destroys the base fee, Ethereum Classic credits it to a contract. That happens inside consensus as each block is finalized, not through a transaction anybody sends: the client writes the amount to a balance directly, and no code runs at the other end. Every Olympia client does it identically, because a client that did it differently would no longer be on the same chain.
A floor, rather than zero
The fee market prices congestion, and Ethereum Classic has none to price: block space runs well under one percent used, with most blocks carrying nothing at all. Left free to fall, a base fee in those conditions reaches zero and stays there, which is not a market clearing price but the absence of one. The floor keeps the mechanism from going inert.
Nothing else moves
No other consensus rule changes and no other instruction is added. The new transaction format sits alongside the existing ones, historical state is untouched, and a contract that never asks about the base fee behaves exactly as it does now.
One later change, already specified
A later hard fork can pay a share of this same stream back to whoever produces the block, leaving the rest for the Treasury. It adds to this design rather than replacing it, and everything above keeps working unchanged. The size of that share is deliberately not set yet. Why it waits.
What miners keep
Everything they earn today. This is the first question a miner asks and it deserves a direct answer before the qualifications: block rewards do not change, and tips are still paid in full to whoever produced the block.
Block rewards are untouched
ECIP-1017 sets how much ETC each block creates and when that amount steps down. Olympia does not amend it, does not pause it and does not route any part of it anywhere. It is the same schedule after the fork as before.
Tips are untouched, and gain a floor
Tips go to the block producer exactly as they do now. Olympia puts an enforceable minimum under them for the first time, where the client default today is one wei and the gwei people actually pay is a wallet convention rather than a rule.
The nuance, stated rather than skipped. At the minimum, a miner is better off, not worse: the Treasury’s gwei is new cost carried by the sender, and the tip floor beneath the miner becomes enforceable for the first time. Above the floor it runs the other way. When a sender pays a fixed total, one gwei per unit of gas moves from the tip to the Treasury.
ECIP-1111 puts that at a low single digit percentage of fee income, measured against Ethereum Classic’s observed fee levels, and fee income is itself a fraction of a percent of what a miner earns while block subsidies dominate. That last clause cuts both ways, and it is the reason the next section matters: the same emptiness that makes the cost negligible makes the revenue small.
How much this actually raises
Very little at first, and that is the honest answer rather than an awkward one. Revenue is the gas a block actually consumes, multiplied by the base fee, multiplied by the blocks in a year. On a chain where most blocks are empty, the first of those three numbers is close to nothing.
Gas consumed is what sets the revenue. The gas limit is not. This is the mistake almost everyone makes with this mechanism. Raising the limit creates no demand, so at the same usage it leaves revenue exactly where it was while making that usage look like a smaller fraction of a bigger number. Olympia does raise the target, so the trap is live: a percentage quoted against the limit describes the limit, not the money.
Ethereum Classic today
Reference figures- of block space is used
0.12%
of block space is used
Blockscout's own figure, averaged over the last 50 blocks
- per block, and falling
1.6384 ETC
per block, and falling
Drops by a fifth at block 30,000,001 under ECIP-1017
- collected in base fees
None
collected in base fees
EIP-1559 is not active here, so the revenue does not exist rather than being zero
Measured from Blockscout on 11 August 2026 and shown until the live read arrives. Check it yourself
It grows without anyone voting
Revenue rises in direct proportion to the gas people consume, so adoption funds the network automatically. No proposal, no rate to set and nobody to ask. That is the property being bought here, and it is worth more than any figure the mechanism raises on day one.
The point is the schedule, not the sum
While blocks stay mostly empty, what the floor collects is small. The near term value of doing this now is that the funding path exists and is tested before the block subsidy has decayed far enough for its absence to hurt.
Where the money does not come from
Four things this is regularly mistaken for. None of them is what happens.
Not from inflation
ECIP-1017's emission schedule is untouched and no new ETC is created. Olympia changes where one fee component goes, not the supply or the rate it is issued at.
Not from block rewards
No ECIP in the suite directs mining revenue to the Treasury. Block rewards are paid to whoever produced the block, in full, on the schedule they already follow.
Not from a foundation, a donor or a premine
Base fee revenue is the only funding source the protocol itself defines. Anyone may send ETC to the Treasury voluntarily, and some will, but that is a gift rather than a mechanism.
Not from Ethereum's burn
Ethereum destroys its base fee. Ethereum Classic destroys nothing, because it has no base fee to destroy. Olympia creates the component and points it somewhere, rather than moving something that was already flowing.
What the base fee does instead is land in a contract nobody can change, which forwards it to the one that holds it. Where it goes, and who owns it.