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, filling the remaining Shanghai gaps from Spiral's partial implementation and delivering every execution-layer improvement from Dencun, Pectra, and Fusaka that is independent of Proof-of-Stake and blob data availability. 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 consequences extend beyond tooling. Wallets, exchanges, oracles, and bridges make integration decisions based on EVM compatibility — ETC re-enters the default support scope of every product in that ecosystem without requiring custom work from those teams. Security auditing tools, compiler improvements, and best practices that the EVM community produces continuously now apply to ETC automatically. And the millions of Solidity developers, auditors, and protocol engineers already working on the EVM can deploy to ETC immediately, with no custom onboarding, no ETC-specific documentation, and no learning curve.

The Olympia Treasury is funded by EIP-1559 basefee revenue and voluntary on-chain donations. Block rewards and tips remain completely untouched and go entirely to miners. Futarchy prediction market activity generates additional transaction volume that flows back into the treasury as basefee revenue. Any stakeholder, whether exchanges, custodians, miners, investment product issuers, or institutions holding ETC on behalf of fund shareholders, can contribute directly on-chain with no overhead. Stakeholders who prefer a traditional giving model can contribute through the ETC Cooperative, a US 501(c)(3) non-profit that accepts tax-deductible donations.

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 announced with sufficient lead time for exchanges, custodians, and mining pools to schedule their upgrades. The process follows the same sequence used for every previous ETC hard fork.

Olympia is targeted for mainnet activation before 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. The process follows the same sequence used for every previous ETC hard fork.

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.

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.

Olympia strengthens ETC's regulatory profile. In the EU, ETC qualifies as a decentralized asset under MiCA, in force since December 2024, exempt from per-asset issuer requirements. In Japan, ETC is recognized on the FSA Green List. In the US, ETC is positioned as a digital commodity candidate under the CLARITY Act, pending Senate passage. As a Proof-of-Work blockchain with no pre-mine, no ICO, and no foundation controlling the protocol, ETC meets the decentralization criteria each framework applies. Olympia's governance architecture reinforces this across three distinct layers: the Olympia DAO, which uses non-transferable membership NFTs for binding protocol decisions; open futarchy prediction markets, where any participant worldwide can stake on outcomes without membership; and the PoW client layer, where miners and node operators exercise governance through the client software they run. Protocol changes achieve distributed consensus when the broader network adopts them. This three-layer structure ensures no single party controls the protocol — the core decentralization criterion regulators apply across every major framework.

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.