Learn-to-Earn: The Essential “G” Concepts You Must Understand in the Crypto Space
Game Finance (GameFi)
Game Finance is a play-to-earn gaming model that runs on a blockchain. Players are rewarded for engaging in various gaming activities with other players, completing an in-game task, or moving through different game levels. The rewards are either in cryptocurrency or NFTs. Unlike traditional video games, blockchain games give users access to their assets. They can transfer out their rewards from the gaming platform hence, they can buy, trade, or sell their assets on NFT marketplaces or crypto exchanges.
Gas (Ethereum)
Gas refers to the fees users pay for carrying out transactions and executing dApps or smart contracts on the Ethereum blockchain. It’s a kind of service charge associated with the blockchain represented in gwei and equal to 0.000000001 ETH. Gwei is a denomination of ether –ETH. Gas is determined by calculating the time it takes to complete an action as well as the computational power each action requires. The whole idea is to reward validators for maintaining network consensus and serve as a spam mitigation tool against heinous network activity. The faster the transaction is processed on the blockchain, the more gas fees required.
Gas (GAS)
This is one of the two native tokens (Gas and NEO) of the NEO blockchain. Gas is a utility token used in settling payments like transaction fees, network usage, smart contract execution, and storage fees. NEO blockchain protocol users can earn GAS via staking the second token NEO which acts as the primary transaction token. NEO gives its holders the right to vote, they are usually minted at the development stage of the protocol. Whereas GAS tokens are minted with a new block.
Gas Limit
This is the highest Gas fee a user is expected to pay on the Ethereum blockchain while carrying out a transaction or executing a smart contract. The Gas limit depends on some factors including the sending speed, transaction complexity, and the level of network congestion at the period of initiating the transaction. The Ethereum network is large and thousands of transactions may be in queue waiting for confirmation. Hence, the network validators prioritize transactions for individuals that pay higher gas fees.
Gateway
These are devices that connect to a blockchain system or a related network using a technology known as the Internet of Things (IoT). A lot of these IoT network devices are constrained by several factors that affect their performance including limited computing power, poor battery life, communication bandwidth, etc. Gateways help to eliminate these constraints so long as the device(s) can run the network themselves. Good examples are a smart car linked by multiple in-car devices or a 5G base station connected to a multitude of IoT devices and a mobile phone connected to various wearable devices.
GitHub
GitHub is a branch of Microsoft that offers free individual accounts in addition to enterprise accounts. They offer private repositories and various hosting services using Git for collaborative software development, and a version tracking system. GitHub is now a de-facto standard for online software development with many advanced collaborative tools, version control, and security features. It is often used for hosting open-source projects.
Governance
This is the formal structure in the blockchain ecosystem used in maintaining transparency, integrity, and technical innovation of a project. Blockchain governance could be either on-chain or or-chain. On-chain refers to cryptographic algorithms governing the consensus mechanism and the computational architecture. While off-chain governance includes interpersonal decision-making not written in the computer code.
Governance Token
It is usually tagged the utility token of a decentralized protocol. A governance token provides its holders with the right to contribute to the protocol’s functionality, products, and features. They can propose and vote for changes in the protocol. Governance tokens are tools used in the democratic management of the protocol in a decentralized and fair manner. They can be staked within a network validator on Proof-of-Stake (PoS) blockchains for rewards to improve the network’s operational efficiency as well as its security.
Graph Node (The Graph)
The Graph node is a tool that enables the Graph blockchain protocol to query and index data from blockchains. It is the main server that handles the processes of obtaining answers to complex queries from blockchain databases. The Graph node updates a data store that can be searched and queried through the GraphQL endpoint.
Grayscale (Institutional Investment Firm)
An institutional investment company that makes crypto assets available to large-scale institutional investors. Grayscale was founded in 2013 and has been based in the U.S with headquarters in New York City ever since then. It has become one of the largest holders of BTC and ETH tokens globally. The firm offers various products and services such as trading, custodial asset management, and access to ETH and BTC trusts. Again, Grayscale offers investors index funds which include DeFi and Digital Large Cap Fund. They
Greenlist
Greenlist is a list of approved cryptos assets that New York Department of Financial Services (NYDFS) -licensed businesses can offer on their platforms. They are two lists, one consists of ten coins including Ripple, Ethereum, and Bitcoin while the other is made up of eight major stablecoins and crypto assets that licensed businesses can list for exchange trading.
Final Remarks
You may love to go through our previous concept explainers on alphabets A, B, C, D, E and F. As you navigate the crypto space, it is important to understand these terms quite well as we roll out more explainers using the chronology of alphabets which we have adopted.
