The runaway success of Base, the Ethereum overlay blockchain owned by Coinbase and designed for faster and cheaper transactions, has led to the creation of a market tied to the fluctuating cost of the total gas needed to power the network, allowing Speculators bet on recurring utility spikes. in the layer 2 system.
Taking a cue from the way traders speculate and hedge in traditional energy markets, Alkimiya, a startup backed by Coinbase Ventures as well as companies like Dragonfly and Castle Island Ventures, allows users to go long or short on the cost of the transactions that are included in the blocks. , or “blockspace”: a representation of the storage and computational capacity of a blockchain.
“Paying for block space is like paying for other energy sources, like cars paying for gasoline or airplanes paying for jet fuel,” Alkimiya founder Leo Zhang said in an interview. “Traditional energy markets have developed that allow airlines to hedge against the price of jet fuel, for example, and we believe there should be a better pricing mechanism for how people value and use this core energy resource, which is space in blocks”.
Launched in August 2023, Base has outperformed its layer 2 rivals, generating more than $14 million in the last month. The increase in activity on Base means that the cumulative gas paid to the network can fluctuate dramatically, from as low as 10 ETH to as high as 200 ETH in a single day.
Unlike many other blockchains, Base does not have a token and has no plans to issue one. Alkimiya smart contracts allow users to bet on how the cost of Base block space could fluctuate thanks to the introduction of AI agents, for example, or on-chain events like the arrival of a memecoin, NFT, or airdrop in particular.
Under the hood, Alkimiya uses a very common decentralized finance (DeFi) architecture in which an oracle tracks the gas consumed by users in the Base, and a smart contract system facilitates accounting and logic, Zhang explained.
“A user can purchase this contract that tracks the total amount of gas paid to the base,” Zhang said. “And the reason this is feasible is because it is completely transparent. “There is no centralized exchange where everything is in a black box.”
