What is Gwei?

Gwei is a smaller unit of Ether (ETH) cryptocurrency in the Ethereum network that is often used as a denomination to calculate gas prices that are paid to miners for transaction processing. A gwei (also known as gigawei) is equal to 1,000,000,000 wei, which is the smallest unit of Ether. 1 gwei equals 0.000000001 Ether which means that 1 Ether equals 1 billion gwei.

Gwei is also named "shannon" after Claude Shannon, a cryptographer, and mathematician who is known as the father of information theory. Besides gwei, there are other units of Ether that are named after important people who contributed to the Ethereum project.

Here are some of these units:

• wei (named after Wei Dai, the “godfather” of the crypto movement).
• kwei which is equal to 10’3 wei (also named "babbage” after Charles Babbage). 
• mwei which is equal to 10’6 wei (also named “lovelace” after Ada Lovelace). 
• twei which is equal to 10’12 wei (also named “szabo” after Nick Szabo). 
• pwei which is equal to 10’15 wei (also named “finney” after Hal Finney).