ETHGas

In August 2025, founder and CEO Kevin Lepsoe framed Ethereum’s problem as a market-design failure. Validators sell a block only when its twelve-second slot arrives; applications cannot reliably reserve ordering, inclusion or cost ahead of time. ETHGas proposed to turn future blockspace into contracts instead of moving activity to a new chain.

Its product menu made that idea concrete: whole blocks, inclusion and execution preconfirmations, and base-fee trades. Prices are quoted in the ordinary gas-price unit gwei and settlements use ETH. This matters because the later GWEI token shares a name with that unit but is not the fuel that pays Ethereum transactions or the settlement asset for the marketplace.

ETHGas says its first realtime mainnet blocks were produced on November 15, 2025. Its example gives 44 sub-blocks averaging 152 milliseconds and 71 transactions inside block 23,788,705. That block exists, but Blockscout timestamps it to November 13. The two-day mismatch remains unresolved, and the offchain sub-block stream still depends on ETHGas's own record.

On December 17, ETHGas announced a $12 million round led by Polychain Capital and a blockspace market with $800 million of participant commitments. The money and commitments were described by the company; they are not equivalent to settled trading volume. They did, however, turn a technical demonstration into a funded commercial launch.

An ETHGas-tagged deployer created the Ethereum token on January 9, 2026, minting all 10 billion GWEI to one receiver. Four days later the Foundation introduced it publicly. A January 19 snapshot scored historical gas spending, social quests and community activity; the January 21 TGE distributed the airdrop as a stake locked for at least 30 days.

That launch decision converted ‘Beans’ and ‘Gas’ points into veGWEI voting weight instead of immediately liquid tokens. ETHGas later reported 20,881 recipient addresses with an average 2,395 GWEI allocation. The token code itself is a fixed ERC-20 with permit signatures and no owner, mint, pause or upgrade function; allocation and locks live in separate distribution and staking systems.

The allocation divides supply into ecosystem 31%, investors 27%, team 22%, community 10%, Foundation 8% and advisers 2%. At TGE, 7.15% of total supply unlocked from ecosystem, 2.5% from community and 7.7% from Foundation. Investors, team and advisers begin with zero; each has a one-year cliff, then a 10% unlock and two-year linear vesting. The remaining ecosystem share releases linearly over ten years.

Stakers choose a lock from one week to four years and receive non-transferable veGWEI. Longer and larger locks carry more voting weight and a larger share of weekly GWEI reward pools; there is no early exit. The Foundation says veGWEI may direct parameters, treasury and upgrades, but reviewed public material does not show a proposal history that demonstrates how those powers have been exercised in practice.

By April, product lead Caridee Ng reported two Open Gas rebate cycles: 6,358 eligible users and 2.4778 ETH in combined WETH rebates across five protocols. ETHGas also shipped multi-relay support so validators could keep other relays while accessing its markets. These are product milestones with measurable outputs, but they do not require GWEI; the Foundation explicitly says the token is governance-only.

That separation defines ETHGas more clearly than its ‘gasless’ slogan. Validators and buyers negotiate blockspace through systems that settle in ETH; users receive sponsored WETH rebates; GWEI holders lock a separate asset to influence incentives and treasury choices. The project has shown a block and counted rebates. Its next proof is whether veGWEI decisions can be traced as clearly as the execution products they are meant to steer.