ETHGas has secured $12 million in seed funding led by Polychain Capital and launched Ethereum’s first blockspace futures market. The new platform, which went live in December 2025, aims to bring predictability to volatile gas fees on the Ethereum network.
The company closed a $12 million seed round with day-one liquidity commitments totaling $800 million from Ethereum validators, block builders, and relays. The platform charges a 5% fee on blockspace futures trades and plans to introduce additional fees for applications requiring real-time settlement. ETHGas is positioning its product as a solution to transform blockspace from a last-minute scramble into a predictable, tradable commodity.
Blockspace futures are contracts that enable participants to buy or sell the right to include transactions in future Ethereum blocks, creating forward price signals and hedging opportunities against gas fee volatility. The market allows trading up to 64 blocks ahead—approximately 12.8 minutes into the future—providing short-horizon price discovery for dApps, institutional actors, and high-frequency users.
Technical Innovations and Vitalik’s Support
Alongside the futures product, ETHGas is developing a “Real-Time Ethereum” initiative that fragments blocks into hundreds of sequential pieces in 50-100 millisecond slices. The company estimates this architecture could increase throughput by 100-200 times while reducing extractable value captured by block producers. This design aims to redirect value toward applications and end users, potentially mitigating certain forms of Maximal Extractable Value (MEV).
Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has repeatedly promoted the concept of trustless on-chain gas futures. His renewed emphasis coinciding with the product launch highlights how the proposal aligns with broader discussions about scalability and cost management within the Ethereum community.
Industry observers have identified several complexities with the new market. Running blockspace trading as a conventional derivative market raises concerns about manipulation and market integrity. Some advisors suggest that a delivered futures structure—where contracts are settled by actual blockspace delivery—might provide more robust price discovery and clearer hedging mechanisms. The product’s short time horizon and concentrated liquidity commitments also create operational and market-structure risks that will require monitoring as trading volumes evolve.
ETHGas’s launch represents a first step in financializing Ethereum blockspace and testing whether short-horizon futures can help manage fee volatility and improve planning for developers and traders.
