What is Gas?
Gas (GAS) is a cryptocurrency used to pay for transactions on the NEO network. NEO is a second generation, Ethereum-like platform with an advanced, open source API. Developed in China, NEO hosts a number of ICO projects on its blockchain, all of which use Gas to fuel their transactions with NEO. Gas is mainly used to pay transaction fees for token and NEO coin movement across the blockchain and is distributed to addresses holding NEO at regular intervals.
History of Gas
NEO originally began as AntShares, founded in 2014 as “China’s first blockchain platform.” It has been an evolving project with some parts still under development, making use of Ethereum-like smart contracts and hosting its own token system. Upon its initial deployment, the NEO team released a “Gas market dApp” where users could go to purchase additional gas to cover their transaction fees. In it first year after being introduced to markets after the AntShares rebranding period, Gas has been extremely volatile, undergoing massive price swings and climbing 22-fold in dollar price over a 7-month period.
How Gas Works
Gas is one of the two native tokens of the NEO blockchain (the other, of course, being NEO). In the genesis block, 100 million NEO tokens and zero Gas tokens were created. Instead, Gas is distributed to all addresses holding NEO at a rate of 8 Gas per block, which are an average of 15-20 seconds apart. Gas is distributed proportionally to the amount of NEO held by each address. NEO holders claim their Gas using a feature built into the platform and most wallets. Eventually, the amount of Gas created will equal the total amount of NEO, at which time no new Gas will be generated.
Gas is primarily used as a flexible transaction fee that can prioritize transactions. Neo Gas works in a fashion similar to Ethereum “gas,” but instead of being denominated in units of its parent system’s namesake, it has properties, characteristics, and a trading symbol of its own. Gas is also used to conduct governance votes on the NEO network and access other functions within the platform.
Why Gas?
- Gas is an essential part of the NEO platform, necessary for transactions, network voting and access to platform functionalities.
- The success of Gas is dependence on the success of NEO: if NEO becomes a launching platform for ICO projects, develops a thriving ecosystem and community, or grows from any other positive aspect, the need for Gas will grow along with it.
- Gas is generated at a very specific amount, at very regular intervals, with a predetermined cap on total amount generated. Much like bitcoin, the coding behind NEO has been well scrutinized and vindicated of containing any malicious code. This makes it a predictable store of value, even though the price of Gas has had a history of being anything but stable.
- Two of the biggest exchanges to list Gas, Binance and KuCoin, offer zero fees for Gas withdrawals.
