ETHGas aims to make transactions by banks and financial institutions more predictable on the Ethereum blockchain, but its institutional service still has an important limitation: financial compensation for unfulfilled commitments is currently set at zero. The condition was acknowledged by the project's founder, Kevin Lepsoe, in an interview published by CoinDesk this Tuesday (3).
“Currently, the compensation amount is set at zero”, said Lepsoe. According to him, the mechanisms to establish payments exist, but the appropriate amount will still have to be determined by the market.
ETHGas states that the commitments made by validators are backed by guarantees deposited as collateral. Under current conditions, however, failure to fulfill a commitment covered by the service would not result in financial payment to the client.
The product, called Institutional Blockspace, is in development and aims to allow banks and trading firms to reserve in advance processing capacity in future Ethereum blocks.
The proposal also includes validator identity checks, compliance controls with financial sanctions, counterparty analysis and rules for ordering transactions. These operations would continue to be settled on the public network, without requiring institutions to migrate to a private blockchain.
The advance reservation, however, does not allow freely choosing who will produce the next block. That selection remains the responsibility of the Ethereum protocol, which limits predictability when few validators meet the institutional criteria.
Only 5% of the network meets the current criteria
According to Lepsoe, qualified validators currently represent about 5% of the Ethereum network. This is an estimate provided by the founder, not an independent measurement of their effective participation in block selection.
A model presented by Delphi Digital calculates that, if these operators controlled 5% of the proposer selection weight, the average wait time for a compatible block would be approximately four minutes. The probability of finding an eligible validator within up to one minute would be 23%.
The numbers are the results of a simulation, not records of delays faced by clients.
ETHGas claims it can provide pre-confirmations in less than 200 milliseconds. This early signal, however, does not equal the immediate inclusion of the transaction in a block nor its definitive finality, which continues to depend on Ethereum's consensus mechanism.
The company intends to raise the share of qualified validators to 20% to 30% or more by the end of 2026. The expansion remains a goal.
No bank was identified using the service in production
Despite the proposal aimed at the traditional financial market, neither Lepsoe nor the Delphi Digital study identified banks using Institutional Blockspace in a production environment.
ETHGas also presents approximately US$ 800 million in block space commitments and a three-year agreement with ether.fi involving ETH valued at about US$ 3 billion at the time of the commitment.
These numbers refer to the project's commercial and infrastructure initiatives. They do not represent realized revenues, investments raised by ETHGas or confirmed bank contracts for Institutional Blockspace.
The Delphi Digital report, published on October 27, was produced by its consulting division under a paid agreement with ETHGas, a relationship relevant to contextualizing its projections.
For now, institutional use of the service remains conditioned on expanding the availability of qualified validators, defining effective financial guarantees and proving that the infrastructure meets the banks' operational requirements.
