What is Blockspace? Think of It Like Digital Real Estate

It’s the very ether…of Ethereum - Imagine Ethereum as a bustling digital city constantly growing larger. Every 12 seconds, a new, pristine plot of land—a "block"—is created. Blockspace is the finite, buildable area on that plot of land.

Every action you take, from a trade to an NFT mint, is an attempt to build on that land. To do so, you must bid against everyone else who wants to build at the exact same time. When a new project launches or the market gets busy, it’s like a frantic auction for a tiny slice of beachfront property.

This bidding war is what you experience as high "gas fees." For years, securing a spot has meant entering a chaotic auction, hoping you bid enough to win the plot without massively overpaying, and with no guarantee you’ll even get it.

The Old Way: A Volatile Bidding War

Until now, the blockspace market has been an unstructured, free-for-all. It's a high-stakes, on-demand bidding war where the highest bidder wins. With the inability to plan ahead, and make forward purchases of blockspace, the price for blockspace is incredibly volatile exhibiting an annualized volume of over 2,000% (Bitcoin and Ether for reference are 35% and 72% respectively). This causes big-time uncertainty and creates massive headaches for everyone involved:

• For Everyday Users: It means unpredictable gas fees that can drain your wallet and lead to frustratingly failed transactions.
• For Traders & Market Makers: It's a constant battle for top-of-block execution. You need absolute precision for your strategies, but instead, you get a chaotic lottery where a millisecond delay or a failed transaction can erase your entire edge.
• For Developers & Protocols: It's nearly impossible to build reliable, high-performance applications. How can you promise your users a great experience when transaction costs can skyrocket without warning?
• For Validators: Revenue is volatile and unpredictable, largely based on the chaotic MEV (Maximal Extractable Value) of the moment instead of a stable, premium product they can offer.

It’s time for an upgrade. It's time to turn this digital lottery into a legitimate asset class.

The ETHGas Engine: The Blockspace Markets ⚙️

This is where our core innovation comes in. The Blockspace Markets transform abstract blockspace into a suite of standardized, liquid, and tradable financial instruments. By creating a structured marketplace for this core digital commodity, we bring predictability, efficiency, and new forms of alpha to the entire Ethereum ecosystem.

Our markets, by definition, provide realtime price discovery into our suite of clear, composable products. The two foundational instruments available today are:

1. Inclusion Preconfirmations: A financial instrument that provides an immutable guarantee for transaction inclusion in a specific future block at a fixed price. This eliminates gas price volatility risk for the buyer and ensures timely execution.
2. Whole Block Commitments: A product that allows buyers to purchase the exclusive rights to the entire payload of a future block. This is designed for Block Builders, and sophisticated trading firms executing complex, multi-transaction strategies that require a private and uncontested on-chain environment.

But this is just the beginning. On the horizon, we're introducing two new, game-changing derivatives to complete the market:

• Execution Preconfirmations (Coming est. Q1 2026): An advanced instrument that guarantees not only the inclusion of a transaction but also its specific on-chain outcome or state change. This provides the highest level of certainty for atomic arbitrage and other high-stakes DeFi operations.
• Base Fee Futures (Coming est. Q1 2026): Cash-settled calendar futures that allow market participants to hedge against or speculate on the future price of the Ethereum base fee. This is the essential tool for protocols and enterprises seeking to manage gas fee volatility and achieve predictable operational costs.

By creating this full suite of products, we are building the complete financial layer for a Realtime Ethereum.

A Marketplace for Two Sides: Buyers & Sellers

Our platform creates a vibrant, liquid marketplace by serving two key groups:

For Blockspace Buyers (Protocols, Traders, Developers):

You no longer need to be a deep expert in the dark forest of MEV to get what you need. Just as an options trader can speculate on the future price of a stock without owning it, you can now use our platform to buy the exact blockspace you need to de-risk your operations and build innovative products faster.

For Blockspace Sellers (Validators & Staking Operators):

This is a whole new world beyond MEV. By connecting to our platform with a simple module, validators can sell their blockspace as a premium, programmable asset. This creates a powerful and predictable new source of yield, making securing the Ethereum network more profitable than ever. Selling blockspace in advance also opens up a vast new area of Fixed Rate Staking.

The Future is Structured

By providing structure to Ethereum’s blockspace, we are laying the foundation for our ultimate vision. This engine—Blockspace Markets —is what makes everything else possible, from providing superior yield to validators to enabling the gasless user experience we all deserve.

We're moving from chaos to clarity. From a bidding war to a structured asset class. This is how we build a Realtime Ethereum.

Ready to see the future of blockspace trading? Access the Blockspace Trading platform and gain your critical edge:

• ETHGas Trading is currently available on Mainnet and for testing on the Hoodi network.
• Monitor the markets in our Testnet App UI (Read Only): https://app.ethgas.com/
• Testing and Trading is only for professional investors and only available via API – view our support docs and developer docs to get started