Ethereum blockspace trading platform ETHGas announced it has raised $12 million in a seed round led by Polychain Capital.
The funding announcement comes after Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin recently discussed the idea of an onchain “gas futures” market, arguing that such a product could give users a clearer signal of expected fees and let them hedge future costs.
ETHGas argues that Ethereum needs “a reimagination of the way blockspace is allocated on the network” and claims that its newly-launched blockspace trading platform is a step in that direction. The company said the market launched with $800 million in commitments from validators, builders and other participants.
Related: Ethereum could get faster in January with gas limit rise to 80M
“Real-Time Ethereum”
In addition to making blockspace a tradable commodity, ETHGas aims to make Ethereum significantly faster — an initiative the company calls “Real-Time Ethereum.” The company claims that purchasable blockspace commitments, called “pre-confirmations,” allow participants “to secure execution at defined points in time.”
ETHGas founder Kevin Lepsoe said this implementation is upstream of current block production services, which are routinely leveraged by maximum extractable value (MEV) bots. Lepsoe explained that the Realtime Ethereum splits the block into “240 pieces of 50ms each” to achieve sub-block guaranteed transaction times.
“The result is almost zero MEV and an Ethereum that feels super fast with effectively 50ms block times. [...] We can actually go faster, but these thresholds are generally 99.9% supported.“
Still, Lepsoe admitted that there are “some centralizing vectors” in the system. ETHGas can purportedly increase Ethereum validator rewards by up to eight or 10 times if all Ethereum were made real-time and automated market makers paid in exchange for blockspace, incentivizing centralization.
He suggested that this is a continuation of an already-existing trend. “Blockbuilders + Relays like Titan, and Ultrasound already process perhaps 50% of the blocks on Ethereum, so there are centralization concerns already in place,“ he said.
Lepsoe said that “to the extent that we are successful,” ETHGas would set up multiple nodes with a leader-election process to mitigate risks arising from this centralization. Still, he acknowledged that such an initiative would necessitate additional effort and community engagement.
Related: Fusaka goes live as Ethereum edges closer to ‘instant feel’ UX
New ways to send transactions
ETHGas claims its system can process over 10,000 transactions per second, with user-defined block placement. Lepsoe said pre-confirmations can be for whole blocks, allowing users to acquire an entire block to fill as they please, top-of-block reservation or guaranteed inclusion in a block. Still, capacity is limited until more validators are onboarded.
The last kind of pre-confirmations are execution guarantees, where not only inclusion is guaranteed but also “a certain price or position is guaranteed within the block.”
“For example, I want to run this bundle or series of trades and ensure that the result is X,“ Lepsoe cited as an example.
Lepsoe said execution guarantees were already tested on mainnet but won’t be deployed broadly until January or February 2026.
He added that validators guarantee the pre-confirmations and can post collateral as Ether (ETH) or restaked Ether through EigenLayer. He said if an agreement is not honored, validators can be slashed in proportion to the amount of acquired blockspace, and collateral can be transferred to the buyer.
Lepsoe said validators have honored 99.96% of preconfirmations to date, but Cointelegraph was unable to independently verify that claim.
“You’d need to trust that ETHGas can intermediate and evaluate the slashing accordingly,” Lepsoe said. “Presently, this hasn’t been an issue.”
Related: Ethereum tripling its gas limit is the ‘floor, we can go higher’ — Sassano
