On-chain Gas Futures: A Genius Idea from Vitalik or a False Proposition for Retail Investors?

Written by: KarenZ, Foresight News

In the Ethereum ecosystem, the volatility of Gas fees has always troubled developers and users.

To address this, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin proposed a thought-provoking solution: to build a decentralized on-chain Gas futures market that uses financial market mechanisms to mitigate the uncertainty of future costs.

The Current Low Gas Fees and Uncertain Future

Although technological upgrades and a quiet on-chain market have made current Ethereum Gas fees very cheap, the community's concerns have not dissipated. Vitalik pointed out this paradox.

While current Gas fees are low, developers and institutions are still asking, "What will it be like in two years?" When the tech enthusiasts present their roadmap in response—fees will remain low, with BAL (Block-Level Access Lists), ePBS (Proposer-Builder Separation), and the future ZK-EVM (Zero-Knowledge Ethereum Virtual Machine) continuously increasing the Gas limit.

However, mere technical promises can sometimes seem powerless. After all, the history of network congestion is vivid.

For project parties, the current low fees do not mean that future costs are controllable. For large institutions, the uncertainty of Gas price fluctuations often becomes a significant barrier to Ethereum adoption.

The Triple Core Value of the On-chain Gas Futures Market

The on-chain Gas futures market proposed by Vitalik essentially transforms the dispersed expectations of Gas fee markets into tradable standardized contracts. This mechanism has several core values:

Transparent Expectation Signals

The price of the futures market itself is a summary of information. If market participants generally believe that future Gas fees will remain low, then the futures price will reflect this belief. Conversely, the opposite is also true, as it is backed by real capital allocation decisions.

Hedging Risk Tools

For different roles in the ecosystem, the Gas futures market can allow developers to tailor risk management solutions:

• DApp: For popular protocols, if they plan to initiate high-concurrency activities such as deposits, NFT minting, or airdrop claims at a specific time, project parties can buy futures in advance to lock in costs, enhancing the activity experience through a "subsidizing users" strategy.
• Layer2 Operators: L2 needs to package data and upload it to the Ethereum mainnet, which is one of their operational costs. L2 operators can buy sufficient Gas futures in the futures market during low Gas periods to hedge against data on-chain cost fluctuations, stabilizing the L2 service fee pricing model.
• Account Abstraction Service Providers: By locking in Gas costs for the next year, the "Gas-free" business model can shift from a subsidized game to sustainable operations, improving user retention.
• Liquidation Bots can use futures contracts to hedge against high Gas costs during extreme market conditions, ensuring timely liquidation operations even amid market fluctuations.

Enhancing Institutional Confidence

Large institutions and enterprises typically dislike unpredictable operational costs. The Gas futures market will provide them with tools similar to commodity hedging in traditional finance, making them more willing to migrate core businesses to Ethereum, further attracting institutional capital inflow.

Explorers of Gas Financialization

Although the concept of Gas futures is still in its early stages, several projects have begun practical exploration.

ETHGAS is building a foundational financial market for the Ethereum blockspace market, which has already launched on the mainnet and can be tested on the Hoodi network. In terms of Gas cashback and hedging, ETHGAS allows DApps to lock in a fixed Gas cost by hedging Gas, transforming volatile costs into predictable operational expenses. Users can trade on DApps collaborating with ETHGAS, paying Gas fees as usual, but in reality, the DApp will bear this cost for users in the background. Later, users can access the ETHGas dashboard to view and claim all cashback. Additionally, ETHGAS will launch Base Fee futures, allowing traders to go long or short on Base Fee.

Hedgehog is a prediction market specifically targeting on-chain metrics, supporting predictions for Base Fee, Priority Fee, funding rates, blob fees, and BTC trading volatility, among others. Hedgehog completed a $1.5 million Pre-Seed funding round in March 2024, with participation from Marshland Capital, Tenzor Capital, Prometeus Ventures, 3Commas Capital, and Nothing Research, as well as angel investors like Lido Finance co-founder Vasiliy Shapovalov, anonymous Yearn Finance developer Banteg, and Gearbox anonymous core contributor ivangbi. Currently, Hedgehog is still in the waiting phase.

Daniele Sesta's DeFAI project Hey Anon announced that it will launch a prediction market called Pandora this month, where everyone can predict events, including Gas fees. Additionally, Pandora can also be seen as a launchpad, allowing users to fork Pandora and create prediction markets specifically targeting Gas prices on the mainnet, sidechains, and L2 layers.

The Gap Between Ideal and Reality: Five Major Challenges for the Gas Futures Market

Despite the potentially enticing prospects, the Gas futures market still faces a series of real obstacles that may determine whether it can transition from concept to reality:

"False Demand" for Retail Investors: The on-chain Gas futures market proposed by Vitalik faces a fundamental question: who will actually use it? Most ordinary users will not actively hedge Gas costs. Outside of periods of severe network congestion, their trading frequency is insufficient to create hedging demand, and they usually have a tolerant attitude towards fluctuations in Gas fees for individual transactions.

Market Liquidity Issues: The effectiveness of the futures market relies on sufficient liquidity, but Gas futures face the "chicken or egg" dilemma: without effective prices, participants are not attracted, and without participants, effective prices cannot be formed. This could lead to a vicious cycle.

Market Manipulation Risks: This is one of the most threatening challenges. On-chain, it is relatively easy to "create" congestion. If a whale establishes a massive bullish position on Gas fees in the futures market, they could profit by initiating spam transactions to clog the network. This reality, combined with the intersection of financial market prices, makes the cost of market manipulation very low and the profit opportunities very high.

Limitations of Predictions: Gas fees depend on multiple variables, including network usage, technological upgrade progress, potential black swan events, and the timing of popular project launches. Compared to agricultural futures, the uncertainty of these variables may be greater and harder to predict.

Inversion of Information Asymmetry: If certain participants possess insider information (e.g., a large project is about to launch or open deposits), they can use this information to profit in the futures market. This effectively encourages arbitrage by those with information advantages over those with information disadvantages, rather than solving the problem.

Conclusion

Vitalik's on-chain Gas futures market represents an elegant economic thought: while the entire ecosystem celebrates low Gas fees, he is already thinking about how to solidify this expectation through market mechanisms.

However, the challenges in reality cannot be ignored: the authenticity of market demand, liquidity, prevention of manipulation risks, and the negative effects that information asymmetry may bring—these are not trivial issues.

This idea reflects a typical cognitive inertia in the crypto space—attempting to use financial engineering to solve problems that should be addressed by technological advancements. But in most cases, hardcore technological progress is the only answer.

免责声明：本文章仅代表作者个人观点，不代表本平台的立场和观点。本文章仅供信息分享，不构成对任何人的任何投资建议。用户与作者之间的任何争议，与本平台无关。如网页中刊载的文章或图片涉及侵权，请提供相关的权利证明和身份证明发送邮件到support@aicoin.com，本平台相关工作人员将会进行核查。