# What is $AR?

Decentralized networks such as Arweave often need an incentive mechanism.

Nodes need a reason to store data, mine blocks, and process transactions.

The main incentive mechanism for storing data is Arweave's native currency - $AR.

# Transactions

$AR is used to facilitate transactions on Arweave.

Every transaction on Arweave costs some amount of $AR. This could be to pay for a data upload to the network, or to send $AR from one account to another (also known as wallet-to-wallet transactions).

$AR is also emitted to miners as block rewards.

To get a general idea of how much uploads on Arweave cost (in $AR), you can use Arweave Feesopen in new window.

# Winston

The smallest denomination of $AR is called a Winston. This is similar to how Bitcoin's smallest unit is a "sat", or Ethereum's smallest unit is a "wei".

Some simple conversions include:

• 1 AR = 1000000000000 Winston (12 zeros)
• 1 Winston = 0.000000000001 AR

When using Arweave's HTTP APIopen in new window, all amounts are returned in Winston.