Gwei
Web3 / cryptocurrency types
Gwei is a denomination of Ethereum's native currency (ETH) equal to one billionth of an ETH (0.000000001 ETH). The term comes from "giga-wei," where wei is the smallest unit of ETH. Gwei is the standard unit used to denominate gas fees on the Ethereum network, making transaction costs easier to understand and compare. Because Ethereum transactions require computational resources measured in gas, prices are quoted in Gwei rather than whole ETH amounts, which would be impractically small numbers for everyday transactions. Example: When sending a token on Uniswap during normal network conditions, a user might see a gas fee quoted as 50 Gwei per unit of gas, which translates to a total transaction cost of approximately 0.001 to 0.003 ETH depending on the operation's complexity. Why it matters for cryptocurrency: Gwei enables users to understand and estimate transaction costs on Ethereum without dealing with extremely small decimal values, making gas fee management more transparent and helping traders evaluate whether a transaction is economically worthwhile before execution.
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