Vitalik Buterin Came Up with an Idea to Create a Market for Predicting Future Ethereum Fees

• Ethereum can get a market for gas futures.
• In this way, Buterin wants to enable users to fix prices.
• The basis could be a basic commission on the network.

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has proposed to create a secure onchain gas futures market that will allow users to hedge the risks of sharp commission spikes in the future.

The idea came amid regular fluctuations in the cost of transactions on the network and discussions about whether the developers’ plans really guarantee consistently low fees.

In the post, Buterin said:

Similar to classic futures on oil or other assets, the platform will offer contracts to buy gas in Ethereum at a predetermined price in a future time window. This will allow:

• Users to avoid the risk of future commission peaks
• The ecosystem will get a new load forecasting tool
• Traders, applications, and institutions to plan operations with more accurate budgeting

Buterin noted that such a mechanism could be based on the base fee, a key component of the total cost of gas.

At the time of writing, the average fee for simple Ethereum transactions was around 0.345 gwei ($0.02), according to Etherscan. The cost of more complex transactions:

• Token swaps — $0.39
• NFT transactions — $0.66
• Bridging — $0.13

Buterin’s idea came amid a series of large-scale network changes that affect Ethereum’s bandwidth. In particular, in February 2025, the first increase in the gas limit took place after the transition to Proof-of-Stake. Validators raised the gas limit to 35 million for the first time since The Merge.

In November, more than 516,000 validators voted in favor of an increase to 60 million, the highest in four years. According to Buterin, Ethereum will continue to grow, but with “smarter changes.”

These decisions are a continuation of the Pump The Gas movement, launched in 2024 by developers Eric Connor and Mariano Conti, who persuaded the community to increase the gas cap to improve scalability.

We would like to remind you that the gas limit increase was related to the preparation for the Fusaka update, which took place on December 3.