Sparks
✧ is a new unit of Ethereum
There are already millions of different tokens priced in ETH. An increasing amount are in smaller units with a lot of zeros after the decimal place. At a glance, it can be pretty difficult to spot the difference between something priced at 0.00001283744 ETH and 0.0000093847 ETH. Not only are they a pain to read, they are even harder to say. Try reading out either of those numbers to a friend. It’s a mouthful. When people who are new to crypto see numbers like that, it can be unnecessarily confusing and a bit daunting. A skeptic may point out that small numbers are intentionally used to play into unit bias, and in a lot of cases, they might be right. In any case, it is a problem. As an increasing number of things find their way onchain—particularly internet-native things—we’ll likely find ourselves spending a lot more time looking at numbers of this scale.
Dollars have cents, Bitcoin has satoshis, and right now Ethereum’s smallest unit is wei. Wei is one quintillionth of an ETH. A quintillionth. That means that 1 ETH is 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 wei. There will inevitably be more uses for that unit over time, and developers are very familiar with gwei (a billion wei), but there is room for easier units for regular usage. We need a new unit for everyday people to use in both name and number.
The question then becomes, what could those units be? What should they be named? Well, we set out to answer that question and create a new unit for Ethereum.
When creating a new unit, there are a few important characteristics to make it easy, durable, and widely adopted.
Here are the characteristics that we defined:
- One syllable word: this means that it is fast and easy to say.
- Easy to spell: easy to learn and type
- Simple to say: pass the “bar test”, if you yell it out at a bar people will know what you said.
- Map to a symbol: it can be reasonably associated with an existing unicode symbol, so that people and applications can have a $-equivalent sign out of the box.
- Is brand neutral: ensure that the unit can be used by any and all teams outside of Zora.
- Has a good vibe: allow for positive associations and room for further expansion.
- Not currently used as a unit anywhere: limit potential for confusion and clashes with existing units.
After a lot of brainstorming, heated discussions, and long slack threads we have landed on something that we are really excited about. When it was put forward it immediately hit and felt right as a new unit.
Today, we are putting forward Spark—a millionth of an ETH—as the new name of that unit. We have also chosen ✧ as the unicode symbol for this unit.
Let’s see how Spark goes up against the checklist:
Here’s how Sparks look when comparing to ETH values:
Instead of saying “zero point zero zero zero one ETH” or “point triple zero one ETH” you can simply say “one hundred sparks”. It’s easier, nicer, and more fun.
Here’s how it will show up in the Zora mobile app:
The ✧ unicode symbol works exceptionally well for typed text situations, but struggles at larger sizes. We have created an expanded version of this symbol which we are open sourcing and putting onchain. Everyone is free to use this in their own experiences where Sparks are being used. We have also done the same for the Mint symbol, which is already seeing broad adoption across the ecosystem.
When we started using the word “onchain” it felt like a glimpse into the future. It makes it easy for people who are already here to communicate the net-new of what’s happening in a way that is easier to understand for everyone. That word is now synonymous with the whole ecosystem and is increasingly widespread and adopted by the likes of Coinbase.
It happened again when we put forward the Mint Symbol, a simple variation of the + sign that is now broadly adopted by almost all platforms in the space.
With Sparks, we hope to make a similar contribution to the ecosystem. Creating an easy way to communicate pricing in this new paradigm that feels comfortable to everyone who’s already familiar with ETH, but making it more accessible to everyone who isn’t here yet.
In the coming weeks, we will be transitioning our mobile experience to be Sparks native. We are excited to enter this new era, and hope others will join us.
