Olympia DAO
How a Funding Proposal Would Pass
A funding proposal is an ordinary OpenZeppelin Governor proposal that spends from the Treasury, and no other route reaches the Treasury’s funds. It declares one of five categories: Core Development, Critical Infrastructure, Network Security, Ecosystem Growth, or Other. Funding usually follows the work: the common case is paying for a contribution the network can already inspect. A commitment that runs in stages is paid in tranches, each its own proposal, with nothing held between them.
Submit
The author calls the Governor's propose() from their own address. Any address can submit while the proposal threshold is zero; above it, submitting takes that much voting power, which only members hold. The description names a category, the recipient and the amount, with a content-addressed reference to the detail.
Vote
CoreNFT members vote For, Against or Abstain during the voting period, one non-delegable vote each. The interface they vote through screens every address the proposal would pay against a sanctions list, and offers no way to vote in favor of a designated one.
Queue
A proposal that passes is scheduled in the Timelock. The schedule is public, and the Governor can still cancel it during the delay.
Execute
After the delay the Timelock executes it, paying from the Treasury's own balance. A batch is sized to fit within one transaction.
Record
Every proposal, vote, schedule and payment can be reconstructed from the contracts' event logs alone.
Ecosystem Growth DAOs
Seasons Funded, Allocation Delegated
An Ecosystem Growth DAO is a body scoped to growing what is built on Ethereum Classic, open to anyone without membership, application or CoreNFT. Olympia DAO would fund it without governing it: Olympia DAO would decide whether to fund each season, how much, and within what theme, and the body would decide to whom. Client development, network security and critical infrastructure would stay with Olympia DAO.
Seed
An ordinary funding proposal seeds one season with a specific sum, and may confine it to a theme. It names every destination the season's funds may reach.
Allocate
The body's model, published before the season opens, chooses among those destinations: a conditional market, a published allocation strategy, a modular on-chain vote, or a process that is not a contract.
Settle
The season closes when its allocation settles. Unless the seeding proposal says otherwise, an unallocated remainder returns to the Treasury.
Decide again
No season is automatic. Each is a new proposal, voted under the same quorum as client maintenance and security response.
Protocol Change
Upgrades Stay With the ECIP Process
Neither Olympia DAO nor an Ecosystem Growth DAO replaces the ECIP process, and a passed funding proposal confers no authority over a specification. Every node operator, miner, exchange and wallet takes part through the client release it runs: an upgrade becomes real when the network runs it.
Propose
A change to Ethereum Classic is written as an ECIP and goes through the ECIP process, ECIP-1000.
Implement
Client teams publish releases that implement it, each on its maintainers' own schedule.
Adopt
Node operators, miners, exchanges and wallets upgrade to those releases ahead of the activation block.
Activate
The change takes effect at its activation block, on the nodes that run it.
Institutional Stewardship
Built on a Decade of Commitment
Olympia was proposed after years of funded, principled stewardship by the organizations that kept Ethereum Classic's core development alive and moving forward.
The ETC Cooperative
US 501(c)(3) Non-Profit · Public Goods From 2017 · Core-Geth From January 2022
Track Record
The ETC Cooperative was formed by Ethereum Classic's earliest core contributors and backed by its largest stakeholders. It funded Ethereum Classic's public goods from 2017, and from January 2022 it funded and maintained Core-Geth through the Mystique and Spiral upgrades, alongside the peer discovery lists, the bootnodes and the public JSON-RPC endpoints the network depended on.
The Transition
The operating model changes, not the commitment.
Each organization that carried this work did so on its own balance sheet, for as long as it could. Olympia was proposed to give the work a funding source in the protocol itself, one that would not close or leave: the long-standing idea of a community fund, written as an on-chain treasury that governance would spend in public.
The Cooperative entered maintenance mode at the end of 2024. Today Ethereum Classic DAO maintains and funds the network's public goods (the Core-Geth client, the bootnodes and the discovery lists) in the ethereumclassic GitHub organization as the funder of last resort, with the day-to-day work done by Ethereum Classic's core developers. Olympia was proposed so that the network would no longer need a funder of last resort.
ECIP-1114 names Ethereum Classic DAO LLC as the legal wrapper it contemplates for Olympia DAO, for the off-chain acts an on-chain organization cannot perform, such as signing the engagement for an audit Olympia DAO has voted to fund. Ethereum Classic DAO would be downstream of Olympia DAO in authority, carrying out what a passed proposal has fixed. Ethereum Classic DAO holds no on-chain role, and no role in Olympia until Olympia DAO is operating.
What Opens Up
Under Olympia, funding for core development would not depend on employment by any one organization. Work would be proposed, voted on and paid in public, by the same process for every contributor, from client maintenance and security response to infrastructure.
A public funding process is also what compliance-oriented institutions look for before they take part: auditable allocations, documented outcomes, no backroom relationships.
Grayscale Investments
ETCG Trust · Launched 2017 · Major Institutional Donor to ETC Cooperative
The Precedent
Grayscale, which pioneered regulated institutional access to blockchain networks, launched the Grayscale Ethereum Classic Trust (ETCG) in 2017, years before Bitcoin ETFs existed as a product category. What made this forward-looking was what came alongside it: Grayscale became a major institutional donor to the ETC Cooperative, indirectly funding core client development for the network underpinning its product. Few, if any, investment product issuers were doing this at the time. What Grayscale practiced on Ethereum Classic then is now a recognized industry trend: ETF issuers funding protocol development, corporate treasuries reinvesting in network ecosystems.
The deeper point is who ETCG represents. Grayscale is the product issuer, but the capital base of the trust is a globally distributed pool of retail and institutional holders. The funding that reached ETC's core development through the Cooperative did not originate with a single centralized entity: it originated with a decentralized body of investors whose capital flows through the product to the network. ETC's development has been backed by decentralized funding all along, and Grayscale provided the regulated access vehicle that made it possible.
With Olympia
Bitcoin, Litecoin and Dogecoin have no native smart contract functionality, so their core development funding depends on off-chain organizations, personal relationships and institutional trust. Olympia proposes an on-chain path on Ethereum Classic instead: once the Treasury's address is published, any stakeholder could contribute to it directly, without an intermediary or a preferred relationship.
The ETF Pipeline
Grayscale converted its Bitcoin and Ethereum trusts to ETFs, and ETCG is a trust that could follow the same pipeline. Under Olympia, a publicly auditable treasury would give an ETF issuer an on-chain way to contribute back to the network underpinning its product.
Frequently Asked Questions
Technical questions about how Olympia's governance would work, institutional questions about Ethereum Classic DAO and the regulatory profile, and practical questions about who could take part and how the Treasury would be funded.
A DAO LLC is a limited liability company formed under Wyoming's Decentralized Autonomous Organization Supplement, which recognizes a DAO as a form of LLC and gives its members limited liability. Ethereum Classic DAO LLC was registered in Wyoming in 2025 (Filing ID 2025-001671865). ECIP-1114 names Ethereum Classic DAO LLC as the legal wrapper it contemplates for Olympia DAO, for the off-chain acts an on-chain organization cannot perform: once Olympia DAO is operating, Ethereum Classic DAO would carry out the off-chain obligations a passed proposal has fixed, such as signing the engagement for an audit Olympia DAO voted to fund. Ethereum Classic DAO is downstream of Olympia DAO in authority, holds no on-chain role, and until Olympia DAO is operating holds no role in anything ECIP-1114 specifies.
Olympia is a set of draft ECIPs in the ECIPs repository, and it follows the ECIP process, ECIP-1000. Its activation blocks are decided at the Olympia Core Devs Call and recorded in ECIP-1111. Client releases that implement it are their maintainers' to publish: Core-Geth's from ethereumclassic/core-geth, where Ethereum Classic's core developers do the day-to-day work and Ethereum Classic DAO maintains and funds the client today as the funder of last resort.
The ETC Cooperative, a US 501(c)(3) non-profit, funded Ethereum Classic's public goods from 2017, and funded and maintained Core-Geth from January 2022 through the Mystique and Spiral upgrades. It entered maintenance mode at the end of 2024, and the services it maintained continue in the ethereumclassic organization, where Ethereum Classic's core developers do the day-to-day work and Ethereum Classic DAO maintains and funds those services today as the funder of last resort. Olympia was proposed to give that work a funding source in the protocol, one that would not depend on any single organization's continued support.
Grayscale launched the Grayscale Ethereum Classic Trust (ETCG) in 2017, years before Bitcoin ETFs existed as a product category, and became a major institutional donor to the ETC Cooperative, indirectly funding the core client development of the network underpinning its product. The trust's capital comes from a globally distributed pool of retail and institutional investors, so the funding that reached Ethereum Classic's development through the Cooperative did not originate with a single entity. Bitcoin, Litecoin and Dogecoin have no native smart contracts, so their development funding depends on off-chain organizations. Olympia proposes an on-chain path instead: once the Treasury's address is published, any holder could contribute to it directly from a wallet, and so could the issuer of ETCG or of any future product.
As proposed, by the EIP-1559 base fee, which ECIP-1111 would credit to the Treasury transaction by transaction. Ethereum destroys that fee, and Ethereum Classic does not charge one today, so nothing is taken from what miners earn: block rewards and priority-fee tips would go to miners unchanged. Once its address is published, anyone could also contribute to it directly, and a miner could name it as a block's beneficiary; no ECIP requires either.
Olympia DAO's members, the Core Contributors holding CoreNFT, would vote on funding proposals. After a published bootstrap list, members would be admitted by a governance vote on a contributor's record, one at a time, with no committee. Submitting a proposal would be open to any address while the proposal threshold is zero, and to members above it. Ecosystem Growth DAOs would be open to anyone without membership. Node operators, miners and exchanges take part in protocol change through the client releases they run.
Each member would hold one CoreNFT, a soulbound token carrying one vote that cannot be delegated or transferred. Votes would be For, Against or Abstain. A proposal would pass when it reaches quorum and its For votes exceed its Against votes, and it would then wait out the Timelock's delay before it executes. Quorum, the voting delay, the voting period and the Timelock delay would be on-chain settings, changed only by proposal.
ECIP-1121 would advance Ethereum Classic's execution layer through Dencun, Pectra and Fusaka and carry that work into Glamsterdam, adopting most of the execution-layer EIPs that do not depend on Proof-of-Stake or blob data availability. Contracts could use transient storage, MCOPY, the BLS12-381 and secp256r1 precompiles and EIP-7702 account code, and with EIP-1559 active, tooling that assumes type-2 transactions would no longer need an Ethereum Classic-specific path.
Olympia is a proposal, targeted for mainnet activation in 2027. Its activation blocks for Mordor and mainnet are TBD: they would be decided at the Olympia Core Devs Call and recorded in ECIP-1111, once the governance contracts are deployed, reviewed and rehearsed on Mordor.
As specified, funds would leave only by a proposal that passes a vote, waits out a public timelock delay and executes through the Governor, and there would be no admin key, multisig or committee. The contracts that hold or move funds would be unmodified OpenZeppelin, CoreNFT votes could not be bought or delegated, and the interface members vote through would screen each recipient against a sanctions list (ECIP-1119). Every action would be reconstructible from event logs, and no off-chain entity could unilaterally approve or veto one.
In the EU, ETC has no issuer under MiCA, which has applied in full since December 30, 2024, so MiCA's rules for asset-referenced and e-money tokens do not apply to it. In Japan, ETC is listed on the JVCEA Green List. In the US, ETC is a digital commodity candidate under the CLARITY Act, which stalled in the Senate when a cloture vote failed on September 15, 2026. Ethereum Classic is a Proof-of-Work network with no foundation controlling the protocol and no central issuer. View ETC's full regulatory profile →