Filecoin Gas

What Is Gas (Filecoin)?

Gas refers to the fee, or pricing value, required to successfully conduct a transaction on the Filecoin blockchain platform. Priced in small fractions of the cryptocurrency fil (FIL), commonly referred to as attoFIL, the gas is used to allocate resources of the Filecoin network so that transactions can happen.

The exact price of the gas is determined by supply and demand between the network's miners, who can decline to process a transaction if the gas price does not meet their threshold, and users of the network who seek processing power.

Understanding gas in Filecoin

The concept of gas was introduced to maintain a distinct value layer that solely indicates the consumption toward computational expenses on the Filecoin network. Having a separate unit for this purpose allows for a practical distinction between the actual valuation of the cryptocurrency (FIL), and the computational cost of using Filecoin network. Here, gas refers to Filecoin network transaction fees, not the gasoline for your car.

"Gas limit" refers to the maximum amount of gas (or energy) that you're willing to spend on a particular transaction. A higher gas limit means that you must do more work to execute a transaction using FIL.
"Gas fee cap" refers to maximum number of attoFIL that a user is willing to pay per unit of Gas
"Gas premium" refers to th tip for the miner (an additional reward) you can choose to give to increase our chances of getting our transaction included in the next block through.

From the previous definition we can conclude that GasLimit * GasFeeCap is the maximum amount of FIL that a user will pay to get a certain transaction processed

To draw an analogy, running a real-world car for X miles may require Y gallons of fuel, or moving X amount of money from your bank account to your friend’s credit card account may cost you Y dollars in a processing fee. In both cases, X indicates the utility value, while Y indicates the cost of performing the process of the car trip or financial transaction.

Similarly, a transaction on Filecoin may be worth 50 FIL (X), and the gas price to process this transaction at that particular time might be, say, 1/100,000 FIL (Y).

Filecoin miners, who perform all the important tasks of verifying and processing transactions on the network, are awarded this particular fee in return for their computational services. If the gas price limit is too low, miners can choose to ignore such transactions. As such, the price of gas fluctuates (priced in FIL) with supply and demand for processing power.

What is Filecoin Gas (FilGas)?

FilGas is actually a service similar to what etherscan.io is to Ethereum. It has a set of tools designed to facilitate you the tremendous goal of optimising your money regarding transactions on filecoin network.

On the home page, you will be able to see: