GlossaryAdvanced
Nonce
A number used once, either in mining or to track the order of a wallet's transactions.
In proof-of-work mining, a nonce is a number miners repeatedly change and re-hash while searching for a valid block hash that meets the network's difficulty requirement.
In some account-based networks, a nonce also refers to a counter that tracks how many transactions an account has sent, which helps prevent the same transaction from being processed twice.
Examples
- A miner may try billions of different nonce values before finding one that produces a valid block hash.
- An account's transaction nonce increases by one with each new transaction it sends.