Blockchain Basics
The Ethereum Virtual Machine
Gas
1min
"Gas" is the name for a special unit used in smart contract enabled blockchain networks. It measures how much "work" an action or set of actions takes to perform: for example, to calculate one Keccak256 cryptographic hash it will take 30 gas each time a hash is calculated, plus a cost of 6 more gas for every 256 bits of data being hashed. Every operation that can be performed by a transaction or contract on the platform costs a certain number of gas, with operations that require more computational resources costing more gas than operations that require few computational resources.
