Prerequisites
To help you better understand this page, we recommend you first read Introduction to Parallax.What is a cryptocurrency?
A cryptocurrency is a medium of exchange secured by a blockchain-based ledger. A medium of exchange is anything widely accepted as payment for goods and services, and a ledger is a data store that keeps track of transactions. Blockchain technology allows users to make transactions on the ledger without reliance upon a trusted third party to maintain the ledger. The first cryptocurrency was Bitcoin, created by Satoshi Nakamoto. Since Bitcoin’s release in 2009, thousands of cryptocurrencies have been created across many different blockchains.What is LAX?
LAX is the cryptocurrency used for many things on Parallax. Fundamentally, it is the only form of payment for transaction fees. Laxes are also used as a form of collateral in the DeFi lending markets, as a unit of account in NFT marketplaces, as payment earned for performing services or selling real-world goods, and more. Parallax allows developers to create decentralized applications (dapps), which all share a pool of computing power. This shared pool is finite, so Parallax needs a mechanism to determine who gets to use it. Otherwise, a dapp could accidentally or maliciously consume all network resources, which would block others from accessing it. Laxes supports a pricing mechanism for Parallax’s computing power. When users want to make a transaction, they must pay Laxes to have their transaction recognised on the blockchain. These usage costs are known as gas fees, and the gas fee depends on the amount of computing power required to execute the transaction and the network-wide demand for computing power at the time. Therefore, even if a malicious dapp submitted an infinite loop, the transaction would eventually run out of Laxes and terminate, allowing the network to return to normal. It is common to conflate Parallax and Laxes — when people reference the “price of Parallax,” they are describing the price of one LAX.Mining LAX
Mining is the process in which new Laxes gets created on the Parallax ledger. The underlying Parallax protocol creates the new Laxes, and it is not possible for a user to create Laxes. Laxes are minted as reward for each block confirmed by the consensus mechanism.Denominations of Laxes
Since the value of transactions on Parallax can be small, Laxes has several denominations which may be referenced as smaller units of account. Of these denominations, Wei and gwei are particularly important. Wei is the smallest possible amount of Laxes, and as a result, many technical implementations will base calculations in Wei. Gwei, short for giga-wei, is often used to describe gas costs on Parallax.| Denomination | Value in LAX | Common Usage |
|---|---|---|
| Wei | Technical implementations | |
| Gwei | Human-readable gas fees |
Transferring Laxes
Each transaction on Parallax contains avalue field, which specifies the amount of Laxes to be transferred, denominated in wei, to send from the sender’s address to the recipient address.
When the recipient address is a smart contract, this transferred Laxes may be used to pay for gas when the smart contract executes its code.
More on transactions
Querying Laxes
Users can query the LAX balance of any account by inspecting the account’sbalance field, which shows LAX holdings denominated in wei.
The Parallax Block Explorer↗ is a tool that allows address balances to be inspected via a web-based application. Account balances can also be queried using wallets or directly by making requests to nodes.
Further Reading
- Gwei Calculator↗: Use this gwei calculator to easily convert wei, gwei, and LAX. Simply type in any amount of wei, gwei, or LAX and automatically calculate the conversion.
[This calculator was created for ETH, but functionally it works exactly the same for LAX]