Introduction
Hello. My name is Istora. I’ve been contributing to the Ethereum Classic ecosystem for many years. I maintain the ETC website and have spent a significant amount of time helping articulate and defend the principles that this chain exists to embody.
For those unfamiliar, Olympia is a set of proposals — ECIPs 1111 through 1119 — that, put simply, would redirect transaction fees away from miners and into a protocol-level treasury and distributed through a governance system to fund development. The authors of Olympia are actively pushing it toward activation despite unresolved technical problems, incomplete governance specifications, and significant community opposition.
I am here to explain why Olympia must be opposed and withdrawn. My case rests on three points. First, Olympia fundamentally violates the principles Ethereum Classic was founded on. Second, it is built on broken technical assumptions and introduces unacceptable risks and external control. Third, the process used to advance it has been manipulative and dishonest. I will address each in turn.
Core Principles
With Ethereum Classic, principles come first. Indeed, ETC was founded on, and exists because of, its principles. Shortly after ETC’s creation in 2016, the “Crypto-Decentralist Manifesto” became the rallying cry that defined the soul of its cypherpunk ethos. This document lays out three properties that make Ethereum Classic unique and define its reason for being: immutability, openness, and neutrality. Olympia arguably violates all three of these principles, but most egregiously, protocol neutrality.
The manifesto is clear:
The rules of the game are exactly the same for everyone, period. Without neutrality, the system is skewed towards one set of participants at the expense of others.
Right now, miner compensation is objective and algorithmic. Miners contribute hashrate, and they receive fees. No committee reviews their application. No one votes on whether they deserve them. The protocol, through pure math, treats every participant on an equal footing. That is neutrality.
Olympia replaces this objective neutrality with an inherently subjective system. Fees get redirected to a treasury, and a committee of voters decides who receives them, and who is even allowed to participate in this system. Human judgment replaces algorithmic objectivity. There is no version of this design that preserves neutrality, because the entire purpose of a treasury is to subjectively redirect resources.
I helped write the Decentralism page on the ETC website. It warns against exactly what Olympia proposes, describing a centralization gravity well where a development tax creates second-class citizens and solidifies reliance on a corruptible governance system:
Only the most neutral projects, those without […] Dev Tax […], will attract the type of natural contribution that enables long term sustainability.
A Dev Tax. That is what Olympia is. Warned against by name, on the Ethereum Classic website. I helped write these lines. They were not controversial. These ideas were well understood, but the authors of Olympia seem to have forgotten them. I cannot go against my own convictions, and I cannot go against promises I helped put in writing. Implementing Olympia would be breaking a promise to all of those who chose to mine, hold, or build on Ethereum Classic based on those commitments.
Miners, in particular, should pay attention. You are spending real-world energy to secure this chain. You invested based on what we all assumed were the rules of the game - that miners get rewards, and transaction fees, in full, are part of that. With block rewards already declining under the emission schedule, Olympia diverts an increasingly important source of ETC’s security budget. Weaker incentives mean less hashrate, which means less security for everyone.
Miners provide security, miners get compensated. That is the deal. Olympia breaks it.
And if we allow the rules to be changed once, we set a precedent. Today it’s just a little dev tax. Tomorrow it’s implementing the next upstream Ethereum feature that redirects fees. After that, who knows. Once that door is open to this kind of fuckery, it does not close.
Technical Difficulties and Broken Assumptions
Beyond the principles, Olympia is not ready — and cannot be made ready — because of fundamental architectural problems.
The Olympia contracts were obfuscated and undefined until they were finally made public last week. The ECIP specifications have still not been updated to reflect these contracts. The mechanism for managing the treasury funds has changed repeatedly — initially an admin key held by one of the authors, then a multi-sig, now a hard-coded DAO address. The two ECIPs responsible for defining governance transition, 1112 and 13, defer to each other — neither owns the transition. Despite all of this, the authors continue to claim the implementation is “complete.”
The central question remains unanswered: who controls the money? The DAO that is supposed to govern fund distribution has not been finalized, tested, or achieved consensus. The community is being asked to approve fee redirection before anyone knows how the funds will be distributed. That is a blank check.
The authors do not have an answer to this question because the underlying problem is unsolvable: how do you bootstrap fair governance on a permissionless chain? Who gets to vote first? I have been asking this question for months.
In Community Call #42, an Olympia author admitted: “I’m not sure of a way to do it fairly and get consensus.” Four months later, his most recent public comment confirms nothing has changed: “This is the concrete question that hasn’t been answered, and it deserves a direct answer rather than a deferral.”
And even if the bootstrap problem was magically solved, any governance mechanism for distributing these funds embeds subjective decision-making into the core protocol — the very sacrifice of neutrality we covered earlier. The problem is the idea itself.
It gets worse. Olympia specifies a US LLC for handling payments, presumably operated by the Authors. The current contracts also include an OFAC compliance system. Think about what that means. If Olympia is implemented, the US Government is effectively given admin rights over who can receive funds from a protocol-layer mechanism — on a chain born from the principle that code is law. Olympia hands sovereignty from the code to one political system, at the expense of all others. These are not hypothetical risks. They are decisions baked into the current contract system that is supposedly “ready for testnet.”
Process Failures and Call to Action
Beyond the technical problems, there are serious red flags in how this proposal is being advanced.
Community resources — the ETC website, CoinMarketCap listings, community Twitter accounts — have been used to promote Olympia before it has achieved any form of consensus. Worse, the authors have used their ECIP maintainer status to suppress ECIP comments that raise concerns about the bootstrap problem. There is no reason to hide such comments other than to create the illusion of consensus and attempt to bypass this critical step in the process. Instead, they continue to gaslight the community by claiming these concerns have already been addressed, while simultaneously scrambling to update the contracts and cobble together a solution to an unsolvable problem.
The authors claim “overwhelming support” but have provided no evidence. They claim the code is “complete” across three clients but have not shared it for review. You cannot claim consensus while refusing scrutiny.
Pursuing activation without consensus leads to one outcome — a chain split.
The manifesto warns us directly:
Any change to the system’s rules that not all participants freely agree to creates a network split, diminishing network value for everyone.
A chain split harms miners, holders, developers, and every person who has invested in ETC’s future.
There is already significant pushback from ECIP editors, core developers, long-standing community members, and miners. Based on the logic of ETC’s own founding documents, there is already enough opposition to demonstrate that Olympia should be abandoned.
In order to try to avoid this chain split outcome, I have created a petition at nolympia.dev. The goal is to make the opposition to Olympia undeniable. I am asking everyone listening to sign the petition. The more people who sign, the more obvious it becomes that this proposal cannot move forward without splitting the chain.
The more people that sign, the less likely a split becomes, so it’s important that you do. I am confident that we can avoid a chain split, but we need to make it absolutely clear, right now, that Olympia will not have the support it needs.
The good news is that there are alternatives. With proper debate and good-faith engagement, we can come to a positive outcome for ETC’s future. But none of that happens while Olympia is consuming every ounce of energy in this ecosystem. The community needs to encourage the authors to do the right thing and withdraw this proposal before we waste any more time or stress the ECIP process that has guided ETC so far.
To echo the ETC founding documents once more — let’s keep the rules of the game the same for everyone, just like we agreed. Let’s keep Ethereum Classic classic.
Thank you.