04
About a minute.
Last time:the key is the vault.
ETH, the native token
ETH is the asset the machine itself understands — money you can send, and fuel you must burn to use it.
Try it
Maya holds 2 ETH. Some of it has to be fuel, or Jules never sees a payment.
- To Jules
- 1.50 ETH
- Fuel
- 0.095 ETH
- Left in Maya’s bag
- 0.405 ETH
ETH is the money and the meter. Tokens still need a little ETH in the same wallet.
ETH (ether) is Ethereum's built-in currency. Balances are stored in tiny units called wei: 1 ETH equals 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 wei. Wallets hide that math and show you ETH.
You can send ETH to another address the way you would send a payment. That is the simple half. The important half: every time you ask the network to do something — send value, swap a token, mint something, vote — you pay a fee in ETH. That fee is called gas, and it is how the shared computer stays spam-resistant.
ETH is not a stock in a company. There is no Ethereum Inc. issuing dividends. People buy and sell ETH on exchanges because others want to hold it, use it, or stake it. Price is a market. This primer is not investment advice; treat volatility as a feature of an open market, not a bug in the software.
Tokens you hear about — stablecoins, NFT collections, “governance tokens” — are usually records inside smart contracts, not ETH itself. They still need ETH in the same wallet to pay gas, the way a arcade card still needs a coin for the slot.
Takeaway
ETH is both the money you transfer and the fuel the network charges to run your request.