I was thinking about market solutions to high mempool fees and thought about the creation of a mempool transaction fee marketplace.

The idea is you can buy (or sell) transactions at a specific sats/vbyte (or sats/weight) rate on a market. If you believe that the mempool fees are going to keep rising, you can lock in say a rate at 200 sats/vbyte assuming there's an equivalent seller who thinks the rates will dip.

If the rates do dip, the seller can exchange their 200 sats/vbyte contract for a current cheaper one and keep the difference in profits for themselves. Or the holder of the 200 sats/vbyte contract can give in and sell it back on the market for a cheaper price to get some of their funds back. Or, wait until the market is back to 200 sats/vbyte (or higher).

In this way, you can lock-in a bunch of cheap 200 sats/vbyte transaction contracts for future use, even if the rates in the mempool skyrocket to 1600 sats/vbyte.

In the end, since this market is out-of-band with Bitcoin or the mempool itself, it's actually just like a sportsbook casino where you're making bets on the future mempool rates. And your ability to pay a 200 sats/vbyte using a contract during a time when the actual fees are 1600 sats/vbyte is actually just represented by a profit. So, that profit is what allows you make a 1600 sats/vbyte transaction appropriately, using that profit.

You could, of course, just bet on something else like the price of Bitcoin going up, but it wouldn't be really connected to the actions of the mempool or really help in terms of hedging your bets on the future of the mempool. You may be more confident that the mempool average sats/vbyte is going up, and much faster than the price of Bitcoin itself. So it could be an interesting market.

What do you think? Would you buy cheap transaction contracts now, for future use?