ETHGas wants to make Ethereum 240x faster with its blockspace marketplace

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If you’ve ever participated in the crypto economy, you’ve probably used Ethereum and been affected, directly or otherwise, by the concept of maximal extractable value (MEV).

As an economic force baked into blockchain ecosystems, MEV can be a good thing in some contexts, but more often than not, it comes at the expense of regular users by increasing gas fees, and enables opportunities for front-running and sandwich attacks on pending transactions. All of that ultimately affects the user experience, and consequently keeps a lot of serious capital allocators off blockchains. 

“There’s this risk aversion from these TradFi, big money players in the space,” Kevin Lepsoe, founder and CEO of ETHGas, told me recently on the Talking Tokens podcast. “Why don’t they want to bring the big assets onchain? It comes down to MEV.” 

The competition to front-run transactions in effect creates a kind of predatory environment, Lepsoe explained. “This is actually the blocker to getting a lot of the institutional flows onchain. If we could address this, then it just unlocks this.” 

ETHGas is on a mission to do just that with a new form of asset, “blockspace futures,” and is building a marketplace to bring transparency around the Ethereum blockspace by letting users trade blocks — basically buying and selling gas. This, Lepsoe, claims will enable certainty that trades or transactions will land on a specific block 

“In crypto, blockspace is the single most valuable instrument,” Lepsoe said. “Ethereum is in the business of producing and selling blockspace; that’s its core business. Yet, if you don’t have blockspace, Ethereum is worth zero. All the assets on it are worth zero. It is so fundamental, it needs its own market.” 

Essentially, the aim here is to flip the conventional “best practice” of building blocks and extracting MEV by moving the goalpost to the other end: eliminate MEV altogether by speeding up transactions. 

ETHGas is doing this by taking a block of Ethereum, which is about 12 seconds long, and cutting it into hundreds of pieces so people don’t have to wait that long for a trade to go through. Transactions could be processed in 50-milliseconds, or 240 times faster, and the timeframe for liquidations would go down from 12 seconds to less than a millisecond. 

When thinking about trading amidst price volatility, “12 seconds is a big period of time,” Lepsoe noted. “If we didn't need 12 seconds and we had 50 milliseconds, [lending protocols] could set much more aggressive leverage ratios. I mean, I'm not going to say double or triple, but it's just more you could take these into account, where you could provide better capital efficiency.”

Bigger firms that need more transactions to go through might buy a whole block, which at the time of recording costs about $35. But smaller players could get a slice of blockspace at a fraction of the price. 

ETHGas shipped to mainnet back in November, but is planning for a bigger rollout in the near future. Alongside its upcoming token generation event (TGE), which aims to give governance tokens to users, ETHgas currently makes up about 5% of blockspace on Ethereum, but has ambitious goals to hit 40% by the end of 2026. 

“​​I think that we'll have like this new generation of real-time DEXs, lending protocols with more risk adjusted collateral ratios that provide more leverage,” he added. “But the end game is a faster, seamless user experience. We don't need to directly touch end users, but everything will be kind of funneled through us.”

The company’s future roadmap will be shaped by users and validators alike, which Lepsoe compares to the “landlords,” of Ethereum. “We need to give them a say.”

“As we roll this out, it’ll just get increasingly faster and faster,” Lepsoe said. 

Check out the next section for more details and the full episode.

For today’s episode, I interviewed Kevin Lepsoe, Founder of ETHGas, about blockspace and how a transparent blockspace futures marketplace could redefine Ethereum’s core economic engine. Kevin explains why Ethereum’s 12-second block time creates fragmentation, poor UX, failed transactions, and institutional reluctance and how slicing blocks into millisecond-resolution windows unlocks a completely new operating model for L1s.

He walks through his background as a trader during the 2008 crisis, why MEV behavior can mirror predatory high-frequency trading tactics, and why institutions won’t put billion-dollar balance sheets onchain in the current environment. Kevin also explains how ETHGas enables instant confirmations, how blockspace futures create the first native yield curve on any blockchain, and why this unlocks fixed-income products, cross-chain arbitrage, and a path toward deeper L1 liquidity.

We discuss its upcoming TGE as well as validator incentives, governance design, airdrops, its Open Gas Initiative, and how gas abstraction can onboard everyday users into an easier Ethereum experience. Kevin also shares why real-time Ethereum could support new classes of trading, lending, and insurance products and why 2026 may be the year blockspace becomes a mainstream asset class.

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Please note this content is for informational and educational purposes only. Any views shared should not be considered financial advice, nor should it be used to make investment decisions. Cryptocurrencies are high risk and you should consult a financial professional before making any financial decisions. Make sure you do your own research. We may have a direct or indirect financial interest in content mentioned in this newsletter.