What is Gigagas? ​
Gigagas is a measure of bandwidth, specifically, billions of gas units per second. Simply put, it is a better metric for measuring bandwidth than TPS. TPS is misleading; let me explain. The complexity of a transfer is very different to a SWAP, NFT Mint, multisig approval, etc. The reason being; each transaction type may require storage or memory reads and writes, addition, multiplication, and many other operations.
These actions are called EVM opcodes, and each carries with them a particular cost to the network, be it the cost of storage on the network of validators or the cost of the entire Ethereum network computing that one random number computation that deemed you a lottery winner. To appropriately charge for this cost, every EVM opcode has a gas cost. Gas, like fuel for your car — yes. Consider gas to be a measure of transaction complexity. Here are some real examples of the total gas cost of common transactions.
| Transaction Type | Gas (Typical & Approximate) |
|---|---|
| ETH Transfer | 21k |
| ER20 Transaction (Token) | 45k to 65k |
| ERC-1155 Transaction (NFT) | 60k to 120k |
| Univ2 Swap | 100k to150k |
| Univ3 Swap | 120k to 250 |
| Yearn Rebalance | 100k to >1M* |
So if you hear blockchain X can support 1000 TPS, you won't know if that’s 1000 ETH transfers, SWAPs or something else. Whereas, if you’re told it can support 10 Megagas/s you will know that’s ~500 ETH Transfers per second, or as little as 10 Yearn rebalances!
TPS Disclaimer ​
Given TPS is a misleading metric, we have chosen to use Gigagas as our primary metric for measuring of bandwidth. This is a more accurate representation of the network's capacity, however, we will still have a target of 100k TPS but that is explicitly for ETH transfers.