ETHGas Unveils Ethereum Blockspace Futures After $12M Seed Round, Securing $800M in Validator Commitments
ETHGas has emerged from stealth with $12 million in fresh seed funding and bold ambitions to reshape how Ethereum blockspace is priced, traded, and delivered. The startup says it is launching the first futures marketplace for Ethereum blockspace, supported by roughly $800 million in liquidity commitments from validators, block builders, and other core network participants.
The seed round was led by Polychain Capital, with backing from Stake Capital, BlueYard Capital, Lafayette Macro Advisors, SIG DT, and Amber Group. Founder Kevin Lepsoe said the round opened in July and closed last month, following an earlier, undisclosed pre-seed of about $5 million raised in mid-2024. Both rounds were structured as token financings using simple agreements for future tokens (SAFTs), with no board seats or advisory roles attached. The company declined to share its valuation.
Alongside the capital raise, ETHGas said it has secured significant non-cash commitments from Ethereum infrastructure players. Rather than equity or tokens, validators and builders are pledging blockspace liquidity to the ETHGas marketplace, aiming to earn higher and more stable yields by selling future capacity in advance.
A futures market for Ethereum blocks
At its core, ETHGas introduces a way to buy and sell Ethereum blockspace ahead of time, instead of competing for inclusion every 12 seconds when blocks are produced. Blockspace—the limited capacity inside each block—determines which transactions execute, in what order, and at what cost.
ETHGas integrates with Ethereum’s existing proposer-builder separation architecture, sitting upstream of block production rather than replacing it. Validators can sell blockspace as far as 64 blocks in advance, roughly 12.8 minutes, creating a short-dated futures market for execution.
The platform supports multiple contract types, including full blocks sold ahead of time, inclusion guarantees for specific blocks, execution guarantees tied to price or state, and multi-block packages that span consecutive blocks or fixed time windows. According to Lepsoe, these tools allow validators to extract more value from block production while offering buyers certainty around execution.
For users, the marketplace is positioned as a hedge against gas volatility. Traders, applications, and institutions can prepay for execution, lock in costs, and avoid sudden fee spikes during periods of congestion.
Institutional interest and revenue model
ETHGas charges a 5% fee on blockspace futures trades and plans to introduce additional fees for applications that need real-time settlement. Lepsoe said the company is already seeing interest from traditional financial institutions, sovereign entities, and digital asset treasury firms exploring how blockspace dynamics will matter as more real-world assets and institutional capital move onchain.
The pitch, he said, is similar to commodities markets: producers sell capacity forward to reduce uncertainty, while buyers secure guaranteed delivery. ETHGas argues that applying this model to Ethereum can improve transparency, reduce risk, and shift power dynamics in how blockspace is allocated.
Toward faster, “real-time” Ethereum
Beyond futures trading, ETHGas is also working on a more radical upgrade: slicing blocks into hundreds of sequential segments measured in milliseconds. The goal is to make Ethereum effectively 100 to 200 times faster, while minimizing or even eliminating maximal extractable value (MEV).
In this model, ETHGas runs two parallel systems. One allows traditional MEV strategies to continue, but at higher costs that benefit validators. The other introduces real-time sequencing designed to suppress MEV and redirect value toward applications, liquidity providers, and end users. The company says this approach has already been tested on mainnet, with a broader rollout targeted for the first quarter of next year.
The project’s vision aligns with long-standing discussions within the Ethereum community. Researchers have argued that pre-confirmations and faster execution are essential for better user experience, while Ethereum’s co-founder has previously called for a trust-minimized onchain gas futures market.
ETHGas currently has 18 contributors across Asia, Europe, and the U.S., with about half of the team based in Hong Kong. The project spun out of Infinity Exchange, a fixed-income protocol now paused, with ETHGas born from efforts to tackle MEV and liquidation risks that have kept large pools of institutional capital on the sidelines.