What is Gas?

Gas is a unit of computational effort on blockchain networks. It serves as a measure of the resources consumed during contract execution. Each operation in a smart contract, such as reading or writing data, executing computations, or interacting with other contracts, consumes a specific amount of gas. The gas cost for deploying or interacting with a contract in Partisia blockchain is determined by considering three main factors: network, CPU and storage. You can read the pricing for CPU and network here and the pricing for storage here.

Gas value and contract balance

Gas is bought through BYOC, any brought coin represents an amount of gas where you slowly siphon away the value of the brought coin when using the gas. The brought coins value slowly diminishes when you convert the value to gas. The gas is used when a user sends a transaction to a smart contract, the contract needs gas to do its computation on the blockchain to pay the node operators for their work. Smart contracts themselves has a gas balance and this needs to stay positive for the contract to keep alive. If you send more gas than the transaction cost it will go to the contract balance. When creating contract-to-contract transactions it is paid by the incoming transaction by default, but can be changed to use the contracts own balance.

If you want to learn more about being efficient with gas consumption you can visit our best practice article. Rules of thumb when working with gas optimization is to reduce the effort of the cpu and use less network traffic. The CPU usage is the most expensive consumer when working with large data sets, whereas network traffic can cost a lot depending on the size of the contract. Ideally you would want to optimize your cpu usage and minimize the size of your contracts as a developer.