Vitalik Buterin floats gas futures on Ethereum to hedge fee spikes

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has floated the idea for an onchain futures market for gas, which could give users certainty over transaction fees as the network becomes more widely adopted.

In a post on X on Saturday, Buterin argued that the market needs a “good trustless onchain gas futures market,” as people have been questioning him over the certainty of low gas fees via current price reduction methods in Ethereum’s roadmap.

Buterin outlined that one way to address the uncertainty would be to enable users to essentially lock in prices for specific times in the future, as he outlined one potential market for Ethereum Base fees — a crucial factor in the overall gas fees

How an Ethereum gas futures market would work

In a traditional futures market, contracts are offered to buy or sell assets, such as oil, at a set price in the future, enabling investors to speculate on price changes and producers to hedge against future risks

In an Ethereum context, the futures market would essentially do the same, offer gas fees at set prices at future time windows, allowing users of the network to potentially save on future price spikes if they occur.

Source: Vitalik ButerinAs such, a well-established and reliable futures market would provide a key metric for the ecosystem to speculate, plan or build around.

“An onchain gas futures market would help solve this: people would get a clear signal of people’s expectations of future gas fees, and would even be able to hedge against future gas prices, effectively prepaying for any specific quantity of gas in a specific time interval,” he said

A functional prediction market such as this would provide an essential service for users with heavy volume on the network, such as traders, builders, applications and institutions, who require a level of certainty for projecting operation costs

Ethereum gas fees have fallen throughout 2025

The idea from Buterin comes at when Ethereum’s average gas fees for basic transactions are sitting at around 0.474 gwei, or $0.01 at the time of writing, according to data from Etherscan.

Related: Ether supply squeeze looms with exchanges holding lowest levels since 2015

However, for more complex transactions such as token swaps, NFT sales and bridging assets, the average costs are sitting at around $0.16, $0.27 and $0.05.

While Ethereum transaction fees have continued to decline in 2025, the average costs across all types of transactions have seen many spikes and crashes. Data from Ycharts shows that the average fee started the year at $1 and has since declined to $0.30, with surges to as high as $2.60 and crashes to as low as $0.18 along the way

Ethereum transaction fee fluctuations in 2025. Source: Ycharts Magazine: Solana vs Ethereum ETFs, Facebook’s influence on Bitwise: Hunter Horsley

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