## ETHGas Breaks Through Ethereum Space Market, Raises 12 Million USD to Build Ecosystem

The blockchain space futures market welcomes a new player. ETHGas recently announced the completion of a 12 million USD seed round of funding, while launching Ethereum's first native blockchain space futures trading market, securing a total liquidity commitment of 800 million USD from validators, block builders, and ecosystem participants. This funding round was led by Polychain Capital, with participation from Stake Capital, BlueYard Capital, Lafayette Macro Advisors, SIG DT, Amber Group, and other institutions.

Founder Kevin Lepsoe told The Block that the project previously completed an undisclosed private placement of 5 million USD in mid-2024. The new funding round started in July and concluded last month, entirely in token form, using a SAFT (Simple Agreement for Future Tokens) structure, consistent with the previous round. Notably, Lepsoe declined to disclose the valuation after the funding and did not offer board seats or advisory roles to investors.

Beyond the funding, the 800 million USD liquidity commitments are particularly critical. These commitments come from Ethereum validators, block builders, and relay nodes, not traditional cash investments, but through providing Ethereum block space to the ETHGas market in exchange for higher and more stable yields.

## Blockchain Space Commoditization: Future Market Infrastructure

ETHGas's core innovation is transforming Ethereum's block space into tradable futures products. In traditional models, blocks and their transactions are settled only at creation, with a cycle of about 12 seconds. ETHGas allows validators to pre-sell up to 64 blocks (about 12.8 minutes) of space, enabling buyers and sellers to discover prices before the blocks are formed.

Lepsoe likened this to energy markets: "Just like oil or energy producers pre-sell orders days, weeks, or even months in advance, while airlines or steel mills purchase this capacity to ensure delivery. Commodity futures markets exist precisely because of this risk hedging need."

Validators can sell various types of block space commitments on ETHGas: full block pre-sales, inclusion commitments (guaranteeing transactions are included), execution commitments (guaranteeing specific prices or states), and multi-block commitments (continuous multiple blocks or one-minute Ethereum time). This multi-layered design allows validators to extract more MEV (Maximum Extractable Value), significantly increasing ETH staking yields — which is the core incentive for validators to participate in ETHGas.

From the user perspective, traders, applications, and institutions can hedge Gas costs and prepay transaction fees through this market, completely avoiding the risk of Gas price surges. Lepsoe pointed out: "Many traditional financial institutions and sovereign wealth funds have shown strong interest in understanding and accessing block space. As more institutional and real-world assets (RWA) flow into Ethereum, managing block space amid trillions of dollars of on-chain assets has become a reality."

ETHGas has received interest from several digital asset management companies (DAM) for large projects. Lepsoe said some projects are supported but cannot be disclosed at this time; more details will be announced in January. The platform profits by charging a 5% fee on futures trading and plans to introduce charges for real-time payment applications in the future.

## Path to Real-Time Ethereum

ETHGas's ambitions go beyond blockchain space futures. The team is working to increase Ethereum's speed. Lepsoe revealed that, unlike other solutions that aggregate MEV blocks, ETHGas will also split a block into hundreds of continuous slices, each 50-100 milliseconds, boosting Ethereum's throughput by 100-200 times. While this effectively eliminates MEV, it allows automated market makers (AMMs) to nearly real-time arbitrage and increase profits by close to 20-30 billion USD.

Ethereum researcher Justin Drake has publicly advocated that pre-confirmation and real-time execution are crucial for optimizing user experience. Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin shares similar views. ETHGas sees its "trustless on-chain Gas futures market" as the realization of this philosophy.

Lepsoe stated: "Once real-time Ethereum is achieved, MEV will disappear. This latest development will compete with today's MEV-based spot markets. Although the technology has been successfully tested on mainnet, it has not yet been deployed at scale. Full deployment is expected in Q1."

## Team and Outlook

The ETHGas team consists of 18 members across Asia, Europe, and the US, with about half based in Hong Kong. Lepsoe mentioned there are no current hiring plans. The project was incubated from Lepsoe's other venture, Infinity Exchange (a fixed income protocol, now paused). Lepsoe explained that ETHGas was born out of the need to address MEV and liquidation risks, two major pain points that have hindered institutional capital from entering on-chain trading.

Overall, the 800 million USD liquidity commitments combined with the 12 million USD funding reflect strong demand for infrastructure innovation on Ethereum.