GNK Price Explained: Native GNK, WGNK, and Where to Track It
How GNKScan shows Gonka token price, what Wrapped Gonka (WGNK) is, HEX vs CoinGecko sources, and how to read market cap without confusing wrap supply with chain supply.
People searching for "GNK price" usually want a single number. On Gonka that number sits at the intersection of a chain-native token, a wrapped market instrument, and an explorer that refuses to invent a quote when every venue is silent. This post explains what GNKScan displays and why.
Native GNK vs Wrapped Gonka (WGNK)
- GNK is Gonka's native token: fees for inference, reward coins at epoch settlement, and the unit of on-chain economics. Ordinary transfers do not pay gas; economic weight is on inference.
- WGNK (Wrapped Gonka) is a bridge/wrap representation used on public markets (for example listings that CoinGecko indexes as Wrapped Gonka). It is the liquid instrument most price APIs actually quote.
When GNKScan shows a USD price, it is answering "what is the market paying for exposure to GNK economics?" — often via WGNK — not inventing a separate fictional spot for an unlisted native denom.
Where GNKScan gets the quote
Sources can change with availability:
- HEX / hot-labs order book — bid and ask on the Gonka-oriented exchange API when it responds. Mid-price is used when both sides exist.
- CoinGecko simple price for
wrapped-gonka— public fallback when HEX is slow or unreachable from serverless regions. - Last stored snapshot — if live venues fail, the UI may show the latest successful price-history row (marked stale in API metadata) rather than a blank tile for minutes at a time.
That order prioritizes the native book when healthy, and prefers a slightly stale real number over a hung request that blanks the homepage.
Market cap caveats
Market cap on explorers is easy to misuse:
- CoinGecko market cap for WGNK reflects wrap circulating supply on that market's methodology, not necessarily full on-chain GNK issuance.
- HEX-derived caps may use exchange-reported or configured total/circulating figures.
- Chain supply breakdowns (total, circulating, vesting, community pool) on GNKScan come from tokenomics / LCD paths and should not be assumed identical to CEX market-cap denominators.
Read the tokenomics guide for how GNK is minted and vested on epoch boundaries.
How to verify live numbers
| Question | Where to look |
|---|---|
| Spot USD on GNKScan | Home GNK Price tile; JSON at /api/market/gnk |
| Price history sparkline | Home tile when snapshots exist; /api/market/gnk/history |
| Chain supply fields | Home supply section / tokenomics API |
| Whether data is degraded | Status and home freshness chip |
Why the tile sometimes shows "—"
GNKScan will not fabricate a price. A dash means:
- no live venue returned a parseable quote in time, and
- no last-known snapshot was available in that server isolate.
Refresh after a short wait, or check CoinGecko's Wrapped Gonka page as an external cross-check. When GNKScan recovers a quote, the tile updates with the next overview refresh (about 30 seconds).