NEO’s GAS vs. Ethereum’s Gas

It appears there is a fair bit of confusion regarding both Ethereum and NEO right now. Most people know the Ethereum network requires so-called gas to complete transactions. This gas is similar to mining fees in the Bitcoin world. However, the NEO ecosystem – which aims to rival Ethereum – has its own native asset called GAS. The latter was formerly known as Antcoin, and the rebrand to GAS is not necessarily the greatest idea. Let’s take a look at what makes NEO’s GAS so appealing.

GAS and gas are not the Same Thing

Back when NEO was still known as Antshares, the project made slightly more sense to novice users. On the one hand, there are the Antshares themselves, which allowed holders to collect Antcoin or ANC. The value of ANC was expected to increase as the AntShares platform became more popular. It would also be used to collect transaction fees through both ANC and fiat currency. Holding ANC would give users voting rights to change the fees in the future, if necessary. It would also be a way to introduce charges for “extra services” rendered by ANS holders.

Having two built-in Antshares assets is quite significant, and it was one of the main reasons so many people started paying attention to this project in the first place. Every Antshare was a representation of ownership to be used for future elections, bookkeeping, and generating AntCoins as dividends for holders. The Antcoins themselves represented the value required to use the Antshares blockchain, access extra features and pay systemic fees. A systemic fee is paid every time someone wishes to write data into the blockchain, including transactions. Indeed, the Antshare-Antcoin relationship still makes sense, and the distinction between the two assets is easy enough for people to understand.

So far, everything is perfectly clear, but things got a bit hairy when AntShares decided to rebrand itself to NEO. All of the coins known as AntShares – or ANS – are now known as NEO. In addition, the Antcoins of the past were rebranded as GAS. It is not hard to see why that would be confusing to some, although it was also a brilliant marketing strategy. Whereas the Ethereum network uses gas for transactions, NEO has its own GAS asset which has a separate value from the main native currency.

In the Ethereum world, gas is used as a transaction fee and is still denominated in Ether. One could argue people spend ETH to transact in Ether, which is similar to how Bitcoin works. With NEO, however, one uses the GAS asset to complete NEO transactions. Capitalization of the asset is of the utmost importance in this regard, although it will still make things pretty complicated for a lot of people. Especially those who have never shown an interest in cryptocurrency before NEO launched will have some homework to do to keep up.

While most people keep an eye on the NEO price, the value of GAS is almost as high as NEO’s right now. There are only 8,240,123 GAS in circulation on the network, each of which has a price tag of US$23.29. NEO itself is valued at US$36.76 per token, with a total supply of 50 million. It is a very intriguing project which has a lot more value attached to it than most people realize. As such, it is of the utmost importance to distinguish between Ethereum’s gas and NEO’s GAS. They are completely different things.