Hasu comments on Vitalik's idea of on-chain gas futures markets: Weak willingness to go long may lead to insufficient liquidity and difficulty in achieving scale.

According to Jinse Finance, Hasu, Lido’s strategic advisor and Flashbots’ head of strategy, commented on X about Vitalik’s proposal to establish an on-chain gas futures market. He stated that the market lacks natural short positions: a large number of users are inherently exposed to gas costs (short) and want to hedge, but almost no one in the market is willing to take long positions on gas, so liquidity may be insufficient, making it difficult to form a meaningful market size.

In response, Vitalik suggested that the protocol itself act as the market’s short side, i.e., by auctioning off future base fee usage rights on-chain (up to 2 years in advance). Although Hasu questioned the effectiveness of the incentives for this model, Vitalik explained that after users or application developers pre-purchase gas, they move from being “natural gas shorts” to “neutral”; at the same time, since the base fee is burned, the protocol is inherently “long” by assumption, and pre-selling can help the protocol neutralize this part of the risk.