In the ten years since Ethereum Classic was born out of its split with Ethereum, a succession of organizations have carried it. ETCDEV, IOHK, ETC Labs, and since 2017 the ETC Cooperative, which has funded core development and run the public infrastructure for most of that time.
The Ethereum Classic Cooperative is shutting down in 2026. Classix is picking up the torch.
Meet the Founders
Classix was created by two visionaries with a radical commitment to the Ethereum Classic project and its underlying philosophy. We have dedicated too much, and see too much potential, to sit back idly and allow the project to lose its soul, or to watch it slow down with the dissolution of the Cooperative.
Istora Mandiri has been contributing to Ethereum since before it was renamed to Ethereum Classic. In the weeks before the DAO fork in 2016 he was one of the voices on /r/ethereum strongly arguing against it, in the heated debates around whether to fork or not to fork. When the fork went through anyway, he stayed with the chain that did not sacrifice “Code is Law”, and created the first version of the community website that same year under the pseudonym Dax Classix. He still maintains it, and wrote its Why Classic? section, the previously missing crystallization of The Original Ethereum Vision philosophy. Since 2021 Istora has hosted more than fifty ETC Community Calls, and he co-maintains the ECIP process. All of Istora’s work on ETC over the last decade has been contributed voluntarily, independently, and without remuneration.
Diego López León is currently the only core maintainer of the Ethereum Classic clients. He joined the ETC Cooperative in September 2021 as its first full-time core developer, hired to bring Hyperledger Besu to ETC, after four years on Bitcoin and Ethereum protocol code at RSK and the Inter-American Development Bank. His role expanded into shipping across Core-Geth, Nethermind, and Besu in parallel, and co-maintaining the ECIP process alongside Istora and other editors. He has also released a new Go client for ETC, Go Ethereum Classic, and co-authored Quantum-resistance in blockchain networks, published in Nature’s Scientific Reports in 2023, along with EIP-7619, which proposes a post-quantum signature precompile for Ethereum.
Our central goal is to keep The Original Ethereum Vision of “Build Unstoppable Applications” alive and well, as a universal good for all forms of intelligence to enjoy for many, many years to come. We believe the founders’ overlapping skills, and the ability of a small team to stay nimble and move on new opportunities and technologies as they appear, are exactly what this project needs right now.
Nolympia
Ethereum Classic has twice had to fend off protocol-layer treasury proposals that would undermine the neutrality of the protocol, and twice Istora spearheaded the defense. The first was against ECIP-1098 in 2021, and the Cooperative itself withdrew its support citing Istora’s work. The second was against Olympia in 2026, another proposal to introduce a protocol-layer treasury, the same idea back with a new name and a slightly different taxation policy.
Istora and Diego opposed Olympia on principle, and encouraged community members to sign nolympia.dev, which subsequently gathered clear majority support from the ETC community, including signatures from mining pools representing at least 80% of the hashrate (the remaining 20% are difficult to quantify). Not coincidentally, that opposition was followed by the disorderly shutdown of the Cooperative, which was responsible for maintaining Ethereum Classic through Diego’s work. Many of the services the Coop operated have as a result been abandoned without notice and left to the community to manage. Diego has done much of the work of keeping them running through that transition. Classix exists to ensure that this work continues, and we will support it for the foreseeable future.
Together, Istora and Diego proposed ECIP-1120 and ECIP-1130 as protocol-neutral alternatives to the Olympia proposal. We find it self-evident that consensus should be reached within the ECIP process before recommending or promoting any future hard forks.
Grassroots Community Building
The founders of Classix have been closely in touch with the Ethereum Classic community for many years, and we intend to use this to our advantage. Rather than recruiting from outside, we are reaching out to the people who are already contributing and giving them a reason to do more. We want to amplify existing aligned contributors first, because that is where we know the untapped potential is. These are people whose work is public and whose judgement we have watched up close, and they understand why Ethereum Classic exists in a way no contractor arriving with a general blockchain background ever will. The people who have been contributing to this project for many years deserve a seat at the table.
Some of them are already working with us. Kevin Lord is helping run a working group on a new marketing push for the chain, the first coordinated one in years.
Kevin Lord has been around ETC since the early days. He was IOHK’s community manager from 2017 to 2020, covering Ethereum Classic through the Mantis years, and then joined the ETC Cooperative in the same role. He spoke at the ETC Summits in 2018 and 2019, and for years was the voice of the chain’s social channels. He is now helping us rebuild them. Classix was recently granted control of the @eth_classic account on X, and posts will keep going through Twitter Together, the open GitHub process where anyone can propose a tweet as a pull request and every post has a public review trail. Around that account we are organizing a new campaign to re-establish activity and interest in Ethereum Classic across multiple platforms.
Together we are also working on a rebrand of Ethereum Classic. Expect further updates on giving the Ethereum Classic brand and its assets a new lease on life.
We might not agree on everything, and that would be boring anyway. What we have decided together is that Ethereum Classic needs a new approach, welcoming and friendly and focused on building bridges, in place of the antagonism that has too often marked relations within our own community and with others. We see a symbiotic relationship with Ethereum and the wider web3 community, not a rivalry. Together, we have bigger fish to fry.
Classix is looking to expand operations, and we want active Ethereum Classic contributors who share this vision to be first to the table. If you have been putting time into this chain, whether writing code, running nodes, making media, moderating, translating, or replicating memes in the right places, we want to hear from you.
Ethereum Classic Situation Report
The Cooperative is shutting down in 2026, and unfortunately no effort was made to hand over responsibilities, so Classix has stepped in to pick up the pieces. The Coop sponsored the public RPC at etc.rivet.link, which went dark with no migration notice and no replacement, and anything still configured to use it has silently stopped working. Until a stable replacement is in place, use chainlist.org to find live endpoints for chain ID 61 and set up failover across more than one. The Catacomb interface the Coop hosts will go offline with its domain at some point in the future, so Classix has published a temporary mirror and the open-source code needed to run one.
More quietly, the exchanges, pools, node operators, and developers who run ETC day to day have lost the one organization they could contact when something broke. Classix is making connections with industry players to become that point of contact. The regular ETC Community Calls are still being held, and they remain the best place to get involved in a high bandwidth discussion about where things are heading.
We already run a block explorer and aim to continue supporting Blockscout. A low resource public RPC is also running, which we will soon replace with Project Triforce, a next-generation network monitoring tool with public observability and block propagation metrics, built around client diversity. Every service will be published as an open-source NixOS configuration so that any operator can clone it, a mosaic defense that survives if any one operator is removed, and so that the next handover, if there ever has to be one, is a git clone rather than a crisis. More details in the 2026 Classix Roadmap.
Funding Classix
Just like Bitcoin, Ethereum Classic does not need a protocol-layer treasury. Introducing one would change the nature of the project and introduce centralization risks. Classix simply stands by ETC’s founding documents:
internal project development can be funded by anyone, whether via a trusted third party of their choice or directly, using the currency of their choice on a per project basis and following a transparent, open and decentralized crowdfunding protocol
The Ethereum Classic Cooperative’s exit is a perfect example of why parties should not be entrenched in the protocol. The funding already exists, but funding alone does not solve anything. What has gone missing is a competent organization to allocate it, with the right people directing it to things that actually add value. Classix intends to be that organization. We encourage competition on a level playing field, and we look forward to a future where multiple teams are contributing to Ethereum Classic without the protocol picking winners.
Classix will always be funded voluntarily. Anyone who holds ETC, or has a position or an interest in it, has a rational self-interest in helping sustain its maintenance, and we will work in the open, with our work published so contributors can see exactly what their support produced. We have a decade-long track record already, and we intend to keep building on it until there is no question that Classix belongs at the front of this work. If you run a mining operation, hold a significant position, build on ETC, or depend on it in any way that a dead RPC endpoint would have hurt, we would like to talk.
In August we were invited to speak at WDMS, the World Digital Mining Summit in Hong Kong hosted by BITMAIN. The ETC Grants DAO, backed by BITMAIN and AntPool, has committed multiple millions of US dollars to the Ethereum Classic ecosystem, and we are confident that Classix can provide value to the chain in a way that meets their requirements.
The chain has been kept alive for ten years by stubborn people who refused to let it die. The Coop provided real value and guided Ethereum Classic through its previous era. But like all things in nature, it has reached its end, and it is time for a new chapter.
Now it is our turn.