# Converting crypto currency units with Nethereum

Documentation about Nethereum can be found at: https://docs.nethereum.com

This document will walk you through Nethereum methods for converting Ethereum currency units.

## A primer on crypto-currency units

Crypto currencies offer several units of value in order to manipulate big and small amounts accurately, exactly like one can tally an amount in cents or dollars depending on the amount to transact.

Below is the breakdown of units for Ether:

Now that we’ve covered the basics of crypto currency units in Ethereum, let’s prepare our environment to interact with a chain and learn with live code:

Note

You also have the possibility to run a conversion-related code directly in your browser by using Nethereum’s playground at the following link: Ether: Unit conversion between Ether and Wei

## Quick playground setup

Start a Geth chain (geth-clique-linux/, geth-clique-windows/ or geth-clique-mac/) using startgeth.bat (Windows) or startgeth.sh (Mac/Linux). The chain is setup with the Proof of Authority consensus and will start the mining process immediately.

using Nethereum.Web3;

using Nethereum.Web3.Accounts;


After that, we need to create a web3 instance based on this new account:

var web3 = new Web3();


Now that our environment is set, let’s start creating transactions in various units:

## Handling units

First, let’s check the balance of one of the accounts provisioned in our chain, to do that, we can execute the GetBalance request asynchronously:

var balance = await web3.Eth.GetBalance.SendRequestAsync("0x12890d2cce102216644c59daE5baed380d84830c");


By default, the returned value is in Wei (the lowest unit of value), not necessarily easy to read unless you’re really talented at Maths:

var balanceInWei = balance.Value;


To make it more human friendly, we can convert the balance to Ether using the conversion utility’s “FromWei” method:

var balanceInEther = Web3.Convert.FromWei(balance.Value);


We can even “counter convert” the balance back to wei using the “ToWei” method (this has no other purpose than demonstrating the method, of course):

var BackToWei = Web3.Convert.ToWei(balanceInEther);