Vitalik proposes creating a gas futures market, but experts question how it will work without buyers.

[Crypto World] Vitalik recently tossed out another bold idea—creating an on-chain gas futures market. But skeptics were quick to weigh in.

Flashbots’ Strategy Director Hasu was blunt: this market is inherently short on buyers. The logic is simple—regular users are already pressured by gas fees (naturally in a short position), so of course they want to hedge against risk. The problem is, who would want to take the opposite long position? Almost no one. Without liquidity, the market is just for show.

Vitalik sees it differently. His solution is for the protocol itself to take the short side—directly auctioning off the right to use future base fees, allowing purchases up to two years in advance. Hasu still has doubts about this incentive mechanism, but Vitalik offers his reasoning:

If users or developers buy gas in advance, they go from being “passive victims” to “risk neutral”; on the protocol side, since base fees are burned, the protocol is naturally in a long position, so preselling can offset this risk.

At its core, the debate is about whether Ethereum can truly solve the persistent problem of gas fee volatility through financial instrument design. Will the market buy in? That remains to be seen.