Gas is Becoming Obsolete: From VM to Resource Market, Blockchain is Moving Towards 'Chain Cloud'

A mature computer hides resource management behind an abstraction layer, yet blockchain has been around for a decade and still requires users to understand Gas in order to use a 'world computer'.

Written by: Fu Gui

The phrase 'Gas is becoming obsolete' does not mean that Gas will disappear, but rather that its explanatory power as a unified resource abstraction in blockchain is declining. This judgment does not stem from a technical upgrade of a single chain, but from four completely different directions, all pointing to the same conclusion.

Four Directions, One Signal

The first direction comes from Hyperliquid. The core users of this decentralized perpetual contract exchange see Maker and Taker trading fees daily, rather than Gas multiplied by Gas Price. HyperEVM still uses HYPE as Gas, and the base fee and priority fee of EIP-1559 are still in operation, but the trading layer has packaged the underlying resource costs into transaction service fees. When a user opens a BTC long position, they are purchasing matching and settlement, not computational instructions in block space. Gas has not been eliminated here; it has been hidden within the business price.

The second direction comes from Solana. SIMD-0553 had entered accepted and merged states, but the accompanying governance proposal SGP-0003 was rejected in August 2026, and the resource fee model has yet to be implemented on the mainnet. Nevertheless, it proposed a split—Base Inclusion Fee and Resource Fee based on requested cost units—that clearly indicates: Solana is separating the pricing of 'being included' and 'consuming resources'. The Base Inclusion Fee answers the question, 'Is this transaction worth being included in a block?', while the Resource Fee answers, 'How much network resource did this transaction actually consume?'. The basis of the Resource Fee is requested cost units, which explicitly lists signature cost, write lock cost, instruction data cost, program execution cost, and loaded account data cost. Solana is effectively breaking Gas back down into the specific resources it originally concealed.

The third direction comes from ICP. The Internet Computer has always used cycles instead of Gas, with cycles linked to XDR, measuring real resources such as compute, storage, bandwidth, and messaging. The Cloud Engines set to launch in 2026 take this further, allowing users to choose nodes, node providers, geographic locations, and replication scales, forming a dedicated execution environment through the protocol. The official term for this is 'user-owned slice of Internet Computer capacity'. When users are purchasing a computing environment rather than a transaction, the concept of Gas itself retreats to the background.

The fourth direction is the most noteworthy, as it comes from Ethereum itself. On August 17, 2026, Ethereum launched the Platåberget testnet as an early public testing environment for the Glamsterdam upgrade. The official warning was issued in advance: wallets, Indexers, and Gas Estimators relying on fixed Gas Limit assumptions may be disrupted by upgrades. Glamsterdam adjusted the Gas costs for operations like state access, and EIP-8037 and EIP-8038 raised and partially independently measured the costs of state creation and state access, making Gas more aligned with the real work of nodes. EIP-7999 is advancing a unified multi-dimensional fee market. Ethereum itself is also breaking Gas back down into the elements it originally concealed: state access, computation, data, and the work of different types of nodes.

When these four routes are considered together, the conclusion becomes clear. Gas is retreating from being the core abstraction of blockchain to becoming a fundamental settlement mechanism in the resource market.

The Problem May Not Be Gas, But the VM

Since Gas is being dismantled, the entire industry’s focus on VM over the past decade may have been misguided from the start.

EVM is the most powerful smart contract execution environment in the ecosystem, with network effects formed by Solidity, OpenZeppelin, Foundry, MetaMask, Uniswap, and Aave still unmatched. However, as the 'underlying execution model of the world computer', EVM is increasingly unable to bear the full responsibilities of the next generation of globally verifiable computing infrastructure on its own. The issue is not that it cannot run programs, but that it has conflated execution, state, resources, and proofs into the same abstraction.

From the perspective of the execution model, EVM is a Stack Machine, with each stack item being 256-bit. Modern CPUs prefer register architecture, and every ADD and MUL in EVM is accompanied by significant stack manipulation. FuelVM’s adoption of 64-bit registers is a direct response to this historical burden.

From the perspective of the parallel model, EVM transactions do not declare state dependencies, making it impossible for the execution layer to schedule in advance. Whether two transactions access the same state is almost invisible in EVM. In contrast, Solana’s Sealevel makes state dependency something the scheduler can see in advance, requiring transactions to declare which accounts they need to access, allowing the scheduler to determine dependencies and execute in parallel. This concept is very close to the dependency graph of modern CPUs. Solana’s true revolution lies not in the sBPF instruction set, but in making 'who can parallelize' a first-class citizen of the execution model rather than a runtime hidden state.

From the perspective of the proof model, EVM’s 256-bit stack structure and state access method are inherently unfavorable for ZK proving. zkEVM has long struggled with proof costs, while future chains must assume that proofs will be required after execution. RISC-V is becoming increasingly important precisely because it provides blockchain with a low-level execution standard close to that of CPUs for the first time, allowing the ecosystems of LLVM and GCC, register architecture, and zkVM standardization to be integrated. The simultaneous alignment of Ethereum and Polkadot towards RISC-V is not a coincidence.

The contribution of Move is entirely from another dimension. It does not pursue 'faster opcodes', but transforms assets from data within smart contracts into language-level resources. In Solidity, preventing double spending relies on audits and libraries, while Move directly constrains this through its language and type system. Resource safety, ownership, and abilities do not address execution speed, but rather resource safety management.

Thus, the competition for VMs is itself a false proposition. EVM provides composable general-purpose smart contracts, SVM offers explicit dependencies and parallel scheduling, Move ensures resource safety, RISC-V provides a general execution ISA, and zkVM offers provable execution. In the future, no single VM will win alone; what is truly being rebuilt is the entire computer.

Blockchain has Rediscovered 'Resources' After Ten Years

Blockchain is not the first to invent resource pricing. It has simply taken a decade to rediscover what the computer industry has known for decades: computation is not a resource, but a set of resources.

Ethereum’s classic model is a one-dimensional Gas, where Fee equals GasUsed multiplied by GasPrice. This model is extremely simple, but it has a fundamental economic issue: different resources cannot substitute for each other, yet they are priced with a single number. A transaction with high CPU but low Storage may be marked as 100 Gas, just like a transaction with low CPU but high Storage. This price does not accurately reflect the real bottlenecks of nodes.

EOS was already doing independent resources for CPU, NET, and RAM in 2018. RAM is property that can be bought, used, and sold back, with prices dynamically changing through the Bancor algorithm. CPU and NET are leased resources, which later evolved into the PowerUp model, essentially renting computing and network resources for a period of time. EOS distinguished between Ephemeral Resource and Persistent Resource long before Sui separated Computation and Storage by several years.

TRON took a different route. Bandwidth corresponds to transaction bytes, Energy corresponds to contract execution, and TRON Power corresponds to governance. Users obtain resource quotas by staking TRX and can delegate resources to others. TRON even allows DApp developers to set consume user resource percent, directly bearing Energy costs for users. This is very close to the later Paymaster and Sponsored Transaction models.

Hive completely abandoned Gas, adopting a conversion from HP to RC. Resource Credits are not tokens but renewable resource credits obtained by accounts based on Hive Power. RC automatically recovers after consumption, with a cycle of five days. This is essentially a quota model, suitable for social and content applications, but not for complex DeFi and high-frequency computations.

These old chains solved "resource measurement," but did not address "resource markets" and "resource abstraction." Users still need to understand concepts like CPU, NET, RAM, Energy, and Bandwidth to use the chains effectively. This is one reason why they ultimately did not become the standard answer in user experience.

However, their ideas have not disappeared. Solana has separated computation into CUs, turning transactions into resource requests. Sui has split fees into Computation and Storage, clearly defining for the first time in mainstream L1 that "executing once" and "permanently storing 1MB" are two completely different economic actions. Polkadot uses ref_time and proof_size to create a two-dimensional weight, along with storage deposits to handle long-term state growth. The shift from Gas to multidimensional resources is not about new chains being smarter than old ones, but rather the entire industry gradually acknowledging that the real resources consumed by blockchain nodes are far more than one type.

The Real War is Resource Pricing

Resource measurement is just the first step. The real question to solve is: who will price these resources? How will resources be allocated? Can resources form a market?

Hedera provides a noteworthy answer. It breaks down transaction costs into Node fee, Network fee, and Service fee, weighted by Bandwidth, Processing, Storage, and Duration, assigning higher prices to scarcer resources. This is no longer Opcode Gas Accounting, but Resource Cost Accounting. More interestingly, Hedera will launch Simple Fees in 2026, packaging complex resource rates into a Base plus Extras format. The underlying multidimensionality and the user interface's unidimensionality make this feasible from an engineering perspective.

ICP takes this direction further. Cycles are linked to XDR, meaning that a surge in token prices will not cause server resource costs to spike simultaneously; developers face relatively stable fiat resource prices. Compute Allocation charges directly based on core usage ratios, with a fixed cycle price for one percent of a core per second. This is not a transaction fee; it is a cloud computing bill.

Filecoin showcases the purest form of a resource market. Clients negotiate prices directly with storage providers, and transactions are published on-chain, forming a Storage Market. Prices are not fixed by the protocol but determined directly by supply and demand. This is the closest example of a decentralized resource market in the entire industry.

Additionally, blockchain space includes a commonly overlooked resource dimension: time priority (Inclusion Priority and Ordering Rights). Priority Fee, Jito-style auctions, and Execution Tickets essentially price "who gets included first and in what order they are executed." If Compute, Storage, and DA correspond to the physical and validation costs of nodes, then Priority corresponds to the scarce positions within blocks. MEV can be seen as a crude, fragmented pricing of this special resource; a mature resource market should explicitly incorporate it rather than allowing it to linger outside the protocol for too long.

From these practices, four levels can be abstracted: Resource Accounting addresses "how much was consumed," Resource Pricing addresses "how much it costs," Resource Allocation addresses "who gets the resources," and Resource Market addresses "how resources can be freely traded." Future blockchain pricing will not be about "better Gas," but rather a multidimensional resource pricing system. Fees will equal the sum of all resource usage multiplied by their corresponding resource prices, including Compute, State, Storage, Bandwidth, DA, Proof, Concurrency, Messaging, and Priority.

Chain Cloud: When Blockchain Begins to Transform Back into Cloud

The World Computer has never truly functioned like a Computer, not due to a lack of sufficiently fast VMs, but because it only has "execution" without complete resource management, scheduling, pricing, isolation, and markets. A real computer would not let every program define its own CPU price. A true cloud would not require users to understand "how much RAM do I need to buy right now?"

ICP Cloud Engines represent the first true productization of "blockchain plus cloud." Users choose nodes, node providers, geographic locations, and replication scales, with the protocol forming a dedicated execution environment. The official dashboard already displays data centers, node providers, and machine specifications. It should be noted that this does not automatically prove ICP is the final answer. It offers a prototype of chain cloud worth observing: blockchain can organize nodes, hardware, locations, replication, and execution environments into a cloud service.

Hyperliquid and GameFi demonstrate another direction. Hyperliquid users purchase trading services, while GameFi players buy gaming experiences. Immutable's Orderbook allows users to list NFTs gaslessly when signing, separating gas payers from transaction signers. Gas has shifted from a user cost to a platform operating cost. This aligns perfectly with the economic model of Web2: users do not pay for infrastructure, only for products.

Chain cloud is not AWS plus tokens. It is a globally verifiable pool of computing resources managed by protocols, priced by markets, provided by nodes, proven by cryptography, and connected by unified execution standards.

The Next Generation Blockchain is a Machine

Pushing this logic to its conclusion, the structure of the next generation Blockchain is no longer "a single chain," but rather five stacked layers.

At the top is the Service Layer. Applications like Trading, Game, Storage, and AI directly face users, who see business prices, not resource prices.

Below that is Resource Abstraction. This layer is responsible for packaging the underlying multidimensional resources into service interfaces that the upper layers can understand. Ethereum's EIP-7999 has already made designs in this direction: multidimensional at the bottom, unidimensional at the user interface, where users only need to provide a unified max fee, and the protocol internally allocates the budget across different resources.

Next is the Resource Market. Compute, State, Storage, DA, Bandwidth, Proof, and Priority each have independent prices determined by supply and demand, forming a tradable resource pool.

Below the Resource Market is the Parallel Runtime. This layer is responsible for dependency graph analysis, concurrent scheduling, and state access management. Sealevel, Block-STM, and Sui Object Model all belong to this layer.

At the bottom is Execution ISA and Distributed State. RISC-V is here; it is merely a universal execution standard at the base of the chain cloud, not the core. The true core is the combination of ISA, Runtime, State, Resource Market, and Proof.

Users Should Not Know About Gas

In the future, users should not see terms like Gas, Gwei, CU, ref_time, proof_size, or storage deposit. Users should only see "exchange 100 USDC for ETH," "buy a sword," "store 1GB for 100 years," or "open a BTC long position."

The underlying pricing formula is multidimensional: Fees equal the usage of each resource multiplied by its current price. However, the pricing formula at the user level is entirely different: User Price equals Service Value plus Resource Cost, plus Risk Premium, plus Platform Margin. The underlying layer increasingly measures resources precisely, while the top layer increasingly hides resources thoroughly. This is what a truly mature computer should look like.

After the World Computer

Gas is not dead; it has simply abdicated. It has transformed from the resource itself into a packaging layer for the resource market.

The evolutionary path of blockchain has gradually become clear: from Blockchain to World Computer, to Resource Computer, to Resource Market, to Decentralized Cloud, and ultimately to Chain-Cloud.

Chains solve trust, while clouds solve resources. The task of the next generation blockchain is not to move all computation onto the chain but to transform global computing resources into a verifiable, tradable, programmable public infrastructure. When this transformation is complete, blockchain will no longer be a faster chain but a truly meaningful cloud guaranteed by cryptography.

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