Gas Price / Gwei

While the gas limit tells the network how much computational work you authorize, the gas price tells it how much you are willing to pay per unit of that work. Gas price is essentially your bid to have validators prioritize your transaction. The higher your gas price, the more attractive your transaction looks to the people processing it, and the faster it is likely to be included in the next block.

Gas price on Ethereum is measured in a unit called Gwei, which stands for “giga-wei.” Ether (ETH) can be divided into incredibly tiny fractions — the smallest unit is called a wei, and one Gwei equals one billion wei. In practical terms, one Gwei is one one-billionth of an ETH. Expressing gas prices in Gwei rather than ETH makes the numbers far more readable — saying “20 Gwei” is much cleaner than saying “0.00000002 ETH.” After Ethereum’s EIP-1559 upgrade, a base fee is automatically calculated by the network and burned (destroyed), while you can optionally add a “priority fee” or tip on top to encourage faster inclusion.

Example: Think of Gwei like cents to a dollar. Just as it would be awkward to say a candy bar costs $0.009, it is far easier to say it costs 0.9 cents. Similarly, instead of quoting an ETH fraction with many decimal places, we say the gas price is “15 Gwei” — precise, readable, and practical.