Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has proposed creating a trustless onchain gas futures market to give users and developers a way to hedge against future transaction costs.
In an X post, Buterin said users often ask whether today’s relatively low fees will persist over the next two years, even with ongoing scaling work across the Ethereum roadmap.
On Ethereum, “gas” is the fee users pay to make the network do something — like sending a transaction or using a smart contract. Every action on Ethereum requires a small amount of computational work, and gas measures how much of that work is needed. When the network is busy, gas costs rise and vice versa.
For years, Ethereum was known for wide swings in gas fees, with costs spiking sharply during periods of heavy activity, especially during NFT booms, DeFi growth cycles, and popular token launches. Because fees rose and fell with demand, users often had little visibility into what transactions might cost from one week to the next.
That unpredictability has eased in the past year as Ethereum rolled out a series of upgrades aimed at boosting network capacity and smoothing out congestion.
Buterin argued that a gas futures market — effectively “a prediction market on the basefee” — could offer “a clear signal of people’s expectations of future gas fees” and allow participants to pre-purchase gas for defined time intervals.
“People would get a clear signal of people's expectations of future gas fees, and would even be able to hedge against future gas prices,” Buterin wrote. “Effectively prepaying for any specific quantity of gas in a specific time interval.”
Pushback: 'No natural short side'
The idea drew several challenges, including from Hasu, the pseudonymous strategy steward at Flashbots and an advisor to Lido and Steakhouse.
“The problem is this market has no natural short side,” Hasu wrote on X. “Many people are short gas and want to hedge it. But no one is long gas. There may be some noise trading, but not enough interest to make a market at a meaningful scale.”
In response, Buterin asked whether “the protocol should be the short side,” suggesting an “onchain auction for basefee claiming rights, at least for 1m gas per block.”
Hasu countered that such a structure may not solve the core issue. “Whoever buys the basefee arguably pays 99% of that value to the protocol,” he said, adding that anyone buying the basefee would only do so if they expect it to rise, which creates a disincentive for shorting.
Buterin replied that the mechanism is aimed at letting “users, or application devs on behalf of their users,” pre-purchase gas to move from “short to neutral,” while the protocol would move from “long… to ~neutral” on the portion of gas pre-sold.
Gnosis co-founder Martin Koppelmann also weighed in, arguing that Ethereum’s burn mechanism complicates the concept.
“Without the burn, every validator would be a natural seller of such a hedge,” he wrote. “With the burn, you only get sellers that need to take on significant risk themselves, and this will charge a lot.”
Buterin’s comments arrive amid a broader period of active development around Ethereum’s cost structure, scaling roadmap, and transaction throughput.
Last week, Ethereum completed its Fusaka upgrade, kicking off the network’s new twice-per-year hard-fork schedule. Ahead of Fusaka, the protocol also raised the block gas limit to 60 million, which increased throughput to record levels.
Buterin has also recently unveiled Kohaku, a privacy-focused framework designed to improve confidentiality on Ethereum, and discussed how “DeFi as a form of savings is finally viable” in an interview about scaling, security, and financial freedom.
