Ether.fi, an Ethereum liquid restaking protocol, is committing $3 billion worth of ether (ETH) to ETHGas, a marketplace for Ethereum blockspace futures, over three years.
The ETH will be sourced from ether.fi’s more than 2.8 million ETH under management (worth nearly $6.5 billion at current prices) as "validator liquidity" into the ETHGas marketplace, ETHGas founder Kevin Lepsoe told The Block. Last December, ETHGas said it had received $800 million in liquidity commitments. At the time, Lepsoe had said that the figure was not a cash investment, but liquidity in the form of Ethereum blockspace supplied into the ETHGas marketplace in exchange for higher and more predictable yields.
Selling blockspace commitments allows validators to "capture much more MEV [maximal extractable value], which results in significant boosts in yields to ETH validators/stakers,” Lepsoe said at the time, explaining the pull for validators to join ETHGas.
As for ether.fi, he said Tuesday that the protocol "earns incremental yield beyond standard staking rewards by dedicating their staked validators to supporting real-time blocks. Such blocks increase the volume of trades, especially among [centralized, decentralized, and high-frequency] traders, thus increasing the overall rewards that one would get as a validator."
Liquidity commitments essentially act as a supply that buyers such as traders, apps, and institutions can purchase in advance for guaranteed execution, hedging gas costs, or other uses.
"Every major commodity market in history has moved from spot to futures. Ethereum blockspace is next," Lepsoe said. "Ether.fi's commitment gives us the validator depth to make that market real, and with it, the foundation for Ethereum to function as a settlement layer for global institutional capital."
The commitment comes as more activity moves onchain and institutional demand for blockspace grows. It is expected to help developers build applications with more predictable costs and execution timelines.
"Enterprises and developers building on Ethereum gain something they never had before, the ability to design applications around guaranteed execution timelines and predictable transaction costs," the teams said. "This changes what is possible to build, supporting Wall Street’s tokenization scale-up and Ethereum’s use in consumer applications where transaction costs, like electricity, become an 'invisible' cost to the consumer."
ETHGas is backed by investors including Polychain Capital, Stake Capital, and Amber Group, having raised $17 million in total funding to date. Earlier this year, ETHGas launched its native governance token, GWEI, which currently has a market cap of around $120 million. Ether.fi also has a native token called ETHFI with a market cap of about $332 million at the time of writing. Ether.fi also offers a crypto credit card and recently said it has 70,000 active cards and 300,000 accounts.
