Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has outlined a new concept for an on-chain gas futures market designed to smooth out one of the network’s most persistent problems: unpredictable transaction fees. Instead of paying whatever gas price the market demands at the moment of transaction, users would be able to secure gas in advance at a known price and consume it later when they need to send transactions.
The core idea is straightforward: market participants could buy a fixed quantity of gas for future use at a predetermined rate, turning today’s volatile, spot-based fee model into something more like a forward contract. This would be handled entirely on-chain through smart contracts, creating a transparent market where gas for future blocks is tokenized or represented in some standardized form and can be traded.
Prices for these gas futures would be set by supply and demand expectations. When the market anticipates heavy network use—say, ahead of a major token launch, NFT mint, or protocol upgrade—futures prices would trend higher, signaling increased competition for blockspace. Conversely, when participants expect quieter periods, futures prices would fall, reflecting lower expected demand.
This design builds directly on top of Ethereum’s existing EIP-1559 fee mechanism, which introduced a dynamically adjusted base fee that is burned, alongside a tip paid to validators. Buterin’s proposal does not dismantle that framework; instead, it adds another layer on top of it. EIP-1559 helps stabilize fees in the short term by responding to congestion block by block, while an on-chain futures market would add a longer-term pricing dimension, enabling users to hedge future fee exposure.
For high-volume users—such as centralized exchanges, layer-2 rollups, large wallet providers, and automation or arbitrage services—the benefits could be substantial. These entities routinely submit large batches of transactions and are especially vulnerable to sudden gas price spikes. Being able to pre-purchase gas at a known rate would let them budget more reliably, offer more consistent pricing to their own users, and avoid pausing operations during periods of intense congestion.
Developers and protocol teams also stand to gain. Smart contract deployments, upgrades, and migrations often require carefully sequenced transactions and sizeable gas expenditures. Under the current model, a surprise fee surge can derail a planned rollout or force teams to delay upgrades. With gas futures, development teams could buy the required gas capacity in advance, ensuring that their critical operations are insulated from short-term price volatility.
The proposal could also lower the barrier for traditional enterprises and institutions that want to use Ethereum for payments, verification, settlement, or data processing, but are wary of fee uncertainty. Corporate accounting and compliance frameworks work much more smoothly with predictable costs than with wildly fluctuating expenses. Turning gas into a forward-plannable line item rather than a speculative variable could make Ethereum more palatable to risk-averse organizations.
On the protocol level, an on-chain gas futures market would create a new economic signal about the state of demand for Ethereum’s blockspace. Rising futures prices for upcoming blocks or time windows would indicate that users expect higher utilization, which could inform decisions by infrastructure providers, layer-2 networks, and even core researchers about scaling priorities and resource allocation. Sustained declines in futures prices, meanwhile, would point to softening demand.
It is important to emphasize that the proposal does not promise cheaper gas. Buterin’s framing is explicit: the aim is not to compress fees, but to make them more predictable and manageable. In economic terms, the mechanism converts highly volatile variable costs into known, forward-looking obligations. Users pay the market-clearing price for certainty instead of gambling on what spot fees will be when they transact later.
From a user-experience perspective, this could eventually surface as new features in wallets and infrastructure tools. A wallet might, for instance, offer an option to “lock in gas for the next month,” automatically purchasing and managing gas futures on behalf of the user. Power users and institutions could interact with these markets more directly, setting their own strategies for how much gas to hedge and over what time horizons.
There are, however, nontrivial design challenges. The system would need a robust way to represent claims on future gas in a way that aligns with Ethereum’s block production and EIP-1559’s fee dynamics. Contracts would have to ensure that the amount of gas bought for the future can actually be redeemed in a way that does not undermine network security or create incentives for validators to manipulate block inclusion. Mechanisms for settling expired, unused, or partially used futures positions would also have to be carefully thought through.
Another risk is the potential for speculation. Any market with tradable forward contracts can attract speculators who have no intention of using the underlying resource. While some level of speculation can improve liquidity and price discovery, excessive speculative activity could distort signals or introduce new forms of volatility. Designing safeguards, such as position limits for certain types of accounts or gradual redemption schedules, may be necessary to keep the market aligned with its primary purpose: hedging gas costs.
A further open question is how this market would interact with layer-2 solutions. Rollups and other scaling systems already bundle transactions off-chain and then post proofs or data back to Ethereum, which itself consumes gas. Large layer-2 operators might use gas futures extensively to stabilize their own operating costs, potentially passing some of that predictability to users in the form of steadier fees on the rollup. Over time, price relationships could emerge between gas futures on Ethereum mainnet and analogous instruments on major layer-2 networks.
For application designers, predictable gas costs can change product strategy. Projects that require consistent, frequent on-chain actions—such as recurring payments, automated rebalancing, or data attestations—are currently forced to either eat variable costs or offload them onto users. With gas futures, a protocol could pre-purchase gas to cover a defined period of operation, smoothing the economics for its users and possibly enabling pricing models closer to traditional subscription services.
From a macro perspective, the introduction of an on-chain gas futures market would mark another step in the financialization of blockspace. Ethereum blockspace is already a scarce economic good. Futures would formalize that reality by allowing time-based claims on future blockspace to be packaged, traded, and hedged in the same way as commodities or energy contracts. This could attract new types of participants—such as professional market makers and risk managers—into Ethereum’s economic ecosystem.
Still, the proposal remains early-stage. It has not yet been formalized as an Ethereum Improvement Proposal, and there is no set roadmap for testing or implementation. Before any mainnet deployment, the idea would likely need extensive discussion among core developers, researchers, infrastructure providers, and major ecosystem stakeholders, followed by experimentation on test networks or within restricted pilots.
If the concept advances, its eventual impact will depend heavily on implementation details: how access is managed, how units of future gas are defined, how settlement interacts with base fee mechanics, and how user interfaces abstract the complexity. Done well, an on-chain gas futures system could transform Ethereum from a chain where users constantly react to fee spikes into one where planning and hedging become the norm.
For now, Buterin’s proposal adds a new dimension to the ongoing conversation about how to make Ethereum not just scalable, but operationally reliable for the broad range of actors that rely on it. While rollups, data sharding, and other scaling efforts focus on increasing capacity, an on-chain gas futures market targets a different pain point: turning an unpredictable cost structure into something that businesses, developers, and power users can systematically manage.