The cypherpunks understood that sovereignty and neutrality are inseparable. The moment you grant special privileges within a blockchain protocol, it loses its reason for being. Bitcoin proved it possible. Ethereum extended it to programs. In 2016, the DAO incident split Ethereum. One side hard-forked the chain to recover the lost funds. The other held that a neutral ledger cannot be edited, and stayed with it.
Ethereum Classic continued, freed from top-down leadership and anchored to explicit principles like Code is Law, censorship resistance, and protocol neutrality. The flag was intentionally planted as a defence against future capture. The first ethereumclassic.github.io was launched that year by Dax Classix under the banner Decentralized, Immutable, Unstoppable.
For ten years without any central leadership, pre-mine or dev tax, Ethereum Classic has persisted and has attracted contributions from all kinds of talents, on the basis of equal footing. While other chains have been captured by centralization, ETC has endured repeated assaults. Ethereum Classic kept going, not through hype or marketing budgets, but through stubborn refusal to compromise.
2025 was a dark year for ETC. A neutrality-compromising treasury proposal called Olympia was announced as a future hard fork without any attempt to reach consensus with ETC stakeholders.
No choice remained but to make the opposition to Olympia undeniable, and to make clear that pushing it through would generate a self-destructive chain split. This took the form of the nolympia.dev petition, signed by many active community members, OGs and important stakeholders. Any pretense of rough consensus was dismantled.
The Ethereum Classic Cooperative, the chain’s institutional sponsor since 2017 and the funder behind most core development and public infrastructure, began to lose its footing. The prospect of it going quiet could not be ignored. A parallel institution had to emerge. Classix was created to pick up the torch.
Classix will demonstrate that Ethereum Classic can survive and flourish without compromising its principles. We will seek funding from parties who share our vision, voluntarily, without taxing them. We will build public goods, maintain infrastructure, and engage the community. We will research new frontiers and build bridges.
The following pillars will anchor our path forward.
- Principles. The stated goals of Ethereum Classic come before anything else, and immutability and neutrality are not negotiable.
- Reproducibility. Every piece of public infrastructure Classix runs is published as an open-source configuration that anyone can deploy, a mosaic defence that survives if any one operator is removed.
- Efficiency. A transparent stack at low operating cost, picking the few things that genuinely matter for ETC’s resilience and ignoring the rest.
- Alignment. We succeed only when ETC succeeds. The team rises and falls with the chain it serves.
- Ossification. We see a future where major changes to the protocol are unnecessary, and we aim to midwife ETC to complete self-sustainability.
If you believe in our vision and in the future of ETC, this is where you act on it. The work is large and the team is small. The chain has been kept alive for ten years by stubborn people who refused to let it die. Be one of them. Join us.
Onwards.