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Today the IC reached a record Cycles Burn Rate! 🔥 However many people don't know what Cycles are and why having a high cycle burn rate is important. ⭐ What are Cycles on the #internetcomputer? ❓ Usage of the Internet Computer is measured, and paid for, in cycles. 💸

In simple terms, a cycle unit represents the cost of executing a single WebAssembly instruction.

Cycles act as the computational resource to execute actions on the Internet Computer blockchain. In general, all canister smart contracts canisters consume resources in the form of CPU cycles for execution, bandwidth for routing messages, and memory for persisted data.

Each canister maintains a balance of cycles, which are used to pay for platform usage. Cycles are represented by 128-bit values. Cycles reflect the real costs of operations, including resources such physical hardware, rack space, energy, storage devices, and bandwidth.

ICP tokens can be converted to cycles to pay for resource consumption on the IC The $ICP to cycles conversion rate is determined through an NNS proposal refreshes daily. Cycles costs varies on action internetcomputer.org/docs/current/developer-docs/deploy/computation-and-storage-costs Cost for storing a GB of data per month: $0.431

One of the most fundamental differences between IC and Ethereum cost model, is that Ethereum leverages “user pays” and the Internet Computer leverages “smart contract pays” (sometimes called “reverse gas”) model.

Ethereum blockchain requires end-users to send payments for the gas smart contracts consumed with every transaction, on the IC, canisters (dapps) are pre-charged with cycles, such that contracts effectively pay for their own computation - freeing users from the responsibility

A browser is all a user needs to interact with smart contracts. Without any hurdles such as creating a wallet, holding tokens, or paying expensive gas fees. The #IC cycles model for payment contributes to the #IC being the next generation blockchain!