Cryptocurrency amounts are stored in tiny base units and displayed in friendlier ones — just as dollars are stored as cents. QRL has a few unit names worth knowing, especially because the two chains use different smallest units.
The display unit
The "whole coin" unit a person thinks in is the Quanta — and it is the same unit on both chains, QRL Legacy as well as QRL 2.0. QRL is the coin's ticker (and the name of the project); the unit you actually count balances in is the Quanta.
The base units
Underneath, balances are stored as integers in much smaller units (this avoids rounding errors that fractions would cause):
- Shor — the base accounting unit on both chains. 1e9 Shor = 1 Quanta.
- Planck — the smallest unit of QRL 2.0 only. 1e18 Planck = 1 Quanta, so 1 Shor = 1e9 Planck.
Putting it together for QRL 2.0:
1 Quanta = 1e9 Shor = 1e18 Planck
So Planck is the finest grain on QRL 2.0 (like Ethereum's "wei"), Shor is the shared mid-level unit, and Quanta is the human-facing unit. QRL Legacy uses the same Quanta and Shor, but has no unit finer than Shor.
Why normalisation matters
Because the two chains use different smallest units internally — QRL 2.0 goes all the way down to Planck, while QRL Legacy's smallest unit is Shor — combining them naively would compare apples to oranges. So before this explorer shows any cross-chain figure, it normalises both chains to a common base (Shor).
That's what lets a single chart or table mix QRL and QRL 2.0 honestly — for example the cross-chain richlist, which ranks holders across both chains, and the supply view. Without normalisation, a QRL 2.0 balance would look a billion times larger than an equivalent QRL Legacy balance, purely because of the unit it's stored in.
What you need to remember
- Whole coins are counted in Quanta on both chains; QRL Legacy is commonly labelled with its QRL ticker on screen.
- Shor and Planck are the small units underneath; they matter when you look at raw values.
- Cross-chain numbers are normalised, so they're directly comparable.
Where to go next
- QRL tokenomics and supply — the amounts these units measure.
- Understanding the richlist — units in a cross-chain ranking.
- Gas and fees explained — fees in these units.