Home
Glossary
Wei

Wei

Beginner
Community Submission - Author: Anonymous
Wei refers to the smallest denomination of ether (ETH), the currency used on the Ethereum network. For instance, 1 ether (ETH) is equivalent to 1x1018 wei (which may also be represented in exponential notation: 1e18 wei).
As the price of Ether and other cryptocurrencies rises, the size of each blockchain transaction tends to become smaller. For example, if ETH is priced at $10, one would need 10 ETH to make a $100 transfer. But if ETH is priced at $150, only 0.67 ETH would be sufficient to transfer the same value in USD. Using ether denomination may be troublesome as the transaction size becomes smaller.

In this context, wei and other denominations of ether may be useful for describing small value transactions, especially in regards to very small amounts of ETH that are typically used for transaction fees or when setting the gas limit of a transaction.

As presented on the Ethereum technical documents, there are several other denominations of ether, each representing a multiple of wei. Gwei and ether are among the most used denominations.

Unit

Wei Value

Wei

Ether Value

Wei

1 wei

1

10-18 ETH

Kwei

10³ wei

1,000

10-15 ETH

Mwei

106 wei

1,000,000

10-12 ETH

Gwei

109 wei

1,000,000,000

10-9 ETH

Microether

1012 wei

1,000,000,000,000

10-6 ETH

Milliether

1015 wei

1,000,000,000,000,000

10-3 ETH

Ether

1018 wei

1,000,000,000,000,000,000

1 ETH


Similarly, Bitcoin uses the term satoshi to describe the smallest unit of its currency. 1 satoshi is equivalent to 0.00000001 BTC (or 10-8 BTC).
Although less popular, BNB has the term jager to describe the smallest unit of BNB, where 1 Jager = 0.00000001 BNB (or 10-8 BNB).
Share Posts
Related Glossaries
Enterprise Ethereum Alliance (EEA)

The industry’s first global standards organization to deliver an open, standards-based architecture and spe...

ERC-20

A technical standard used to issue and implement tokens on the Ethereum blockchain proposed in November 201...

ERC-721

An Ethereum based non-fungible token. This means that each token is unique and as a result, not interchange...

Register an account
Put your knowledge into practice by opening a Binance account today.