Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum, proposed a system that would allow the cost of using the network to be guaranteed in advance.
While Ethereum mainnet fees are at historically low levels, the proposal is to develop a futures market onchain without intermediaries.
This system would enable users to set transaction fees for specific times of the future and reduce uncertainty in the face of possible variations in network costs.
Buterin’s proposal points to a recurring problem in Ethereum: the volatility of commissions.
When activity increases, the cost of listing a transaction can escalate quickly. For example, as reported by CriptoNoticias, although the rates are at low levels, on December 7 those commissions they rose more than 800% in a single day.
Today, this variation depends on what is known as “base fee” (the base rate that automatically adjusts based on congestion, introduced by the update EIP-1559) and the available gas limit per block, increased by default with the Fusaka update.
The co-founder of Ethereum proposes bringing that mechanism to an open market that works within the network. There, each user could purchase a certain amount of gas that would be used in a time interval in the future.
That mechanism would allow “price assurance” of ratessomething equivalent to how a futures contract works in traditional markets, but applied to Ethereum commissions.
What did Buterin say and why does he consider this market necessary?
On December 6, Buterin explained his position in a publication in X. There he stated:
We need a good gas futures market that works on the chain and without trust in third parties. I have heard questions like: ‘Today commissions are low, but what will happen in two years?
Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum.
According to Buterin, part of the community fears that the ecosystem promises low commissions based on future technological improvements, but without a clear way to anticipate whether those changes will actually translate into economical use of the network.
In that sense, Vitalik expanded:
Some say that commissions will remain low thanks to the increase in the gas limit per block, the separation between proposers and builders (PBS), and later the advances of zero-knowledge virtual machines (ZK-EVM). But why should they believe them?
Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum.
To contextualize the technologies or advances that Buterin’s statement includes, let’s look at the following:
- Increasing the gas per block allows more operations to be processed in each time slot, which reduces pressure on commissions.
- PBS (separation between proponents and builders): it is a design that seeks to divide who assembles a block and who proposes it, with the objective of improve efficiency and reduce abusive behavior.
- ZK-EVM (Zero-Knowledge Virtual Machine) – Aims to execute transactions faster and more compactly using cryptographic proofs, which would lower the cost of operating on Ethereum.
However, there is still uncertainty about whether these advances will be enough to sustain stable rates when activity increases.
Buterin’s point is that despite those improvements, there is no tool to show whether the market truly believes these changes will keep costs down in the future. And there comes his proposal:
An onchain gas futures market would solve this. People would get a clear signal of what future commission expectations are and could even hedge against price increases by paying in advance for a specific amount of gas over a given period.
Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum.
In this way, Buterin’s proposal could reduce uncertainty for those who develop applications or manage regular operations, as well as prevent sudden increases in activity from affecting users who need predictability.