Author: Eric, Foresight News

On December 17, the Ethereum block space futures market ETHGas announced the completion of a $12 million financing round, led by Polychain Capital, with participation from Stake Capital, BlueYard Capital, Lafayette Macro Advisors, SIG DT, and Amber Group. Founder Kevin Lepsoe stated that ETHGas had previously completed an undisclosed $5 million Pre-Seed round of financing in mid-2024.

Additionally, Lepsoe mentioned that Ethereum validators, block creators, and relay nodes have committed approximately $800 million to support market and product development, but this is not a cash investment; rather, it is in the form of providing liquidity to the ETHGas market through Ethereum block space.

Although the project is defined as a block space futures market, its true vision is to achieve "Real-Time Ethereum."

Order of Blocks

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin proposed the concept of a gas futures market at the beginning of the month, primarily to address the volatility of Ethereum gas fees. Similar to the logic of commodity futures in the current market, locking in future gas fees through futures contracts serves to make gas costs predictable and controllable.

This way, DApps can lock in gas fee costs before events such as users claiming token airdrops and design activities to subsidize users. L2 can also buy futures when gas fees are lower to stabilize and predict the costs of packaging and submitting data to L1, thus serving businesses that require advance cost calculations, such as tokenization of U.S. stocks.

According to the documentation, ETHGas will also launch a no-code tool called Open Gas specifically for DApps to help them provide gas subsidy programs, allowing users to claim the gas fees consumed on the ETHGas platform after using the DApp.

The design and development of the gas futures market are not particularly difficult; it essentially requires the establishment of an on-chain futures trading market with sufficient liquidity. ETHGas's "trump card" is the block space auction market.

This auction market, named Blockspace, allows Ethereum validators, block creators, and relay nodes to auction space in subsequent blocks to ensure that bidders' transactions will be included in the next block, thus guaranteeing the execution efficiency of those transactions. Additionally, bidders can even bid for an entire block to ensure it contains only their own transactions or transactions from others that they provide.

Comparing transactions to packages, ensuring that blocks include transactions is like guaranteeing that packages are loaded onto a transport plane, while ensuring the execution of transactions is akin to ensuring that packages are delivered on time to specific recipients. Bidding for an entire block is like renting an entire plane to transport one's packages, but one can also sublet any excess space to other packages.

ETHGas's ultimate goal is to achieve "real-time transactions" on Ethereum through Blockspace. This real-time transaction can only be in quotes because the completion of transactions on the Ethereum mainnet must wait for the completion of block confirmation, but if it can be guaranteed that a transaction will be included in the next block, it can be considered "completed" to some extent. We can understand ETHGas as an execution layer on top of Ethereum, but how real-time transactions will manifest on the front end still awaits answers from ETHGas.

The core of ETHGas is to establish an orderly block space, rather than competing for block space through chaotic bidding as is currently the case, which involves a large number of uncontrollable MEV transactions. By attracting infrastructure operators to join Blockspace with predictable returns to create sufficient liquidity for real-time transactions, the resulting efficiency improvements will attract various DApps. DApps will use Open Gas to attract users, and users will bring more transaction volume into the ETHGas network, thereby increasing the revenue of infrastructure operators and forming a positive cycle.

Challenges Beneath the Beautiful Vision

For a DApp about to conduct a token airdrop, it is possible to estimate the number of transactions for claiming the airdrop and pre-book the next n blocks after a certain time, then provide a gas subsidy plan to achieve a controllable budget without causing network congestion during the token claiming activity.

Although such visions are appealing, allowing block space to be auctioned may lead to many foreseeable issues.

First, if institutional users can auction block space without restrictions, they may bid for entire blocks and resell them to retail investors. While this ensures stable and guaranteed earnings for validators, it raises transaction costs for retail investors. In this scenario, retail investors lack the technical capability to compete with institutional users, and even if they can participate in auctions or use the futures market to hedge against rising gas fees, it essentially increases their transaction costs.

Moreover, the futures market could also become a tool for market manipulation, where large players deliberately create a significant number of on-chain transactions to raise gas fees and profit in the futures market. This could lead to increased transaction costs for other users on the Ethereum mainnet. Additionally, as DApp operators are aware of specific time points that may lead to spikes in transaction volume, they could profit in advance through operations in the futures market, turning the futures market into an arbitrage market for those with informational advantages, causing unpredictable losses for ordinary users who simply use the market for hedging.

The birth of a new trading market inevitably means the emergence of arbitrage opportunities due to information asymmetry, which could affect the market's ability to solve the problems it aims to address. For ETHGas, balancing this issue to prevent the "positive cycle" from turning into a "death spiral" may require some necessary restrictions.

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