Blockchain Developer Certification Practice 2026 - Free Blockchain Developer Practice Questions and Study Guide

A byte is a fundamental unit of digital information storage and is made up of 8 bits. This standard is widely used in computer science and digital communications, where bits represent the smallest unit of data, either a 0 or a 1. When 8 bits are grouped together, they form a byte, which can represent a wide range of values, such as a single character in text or a small number in numerical formats.

The choice of 8 bits for a byte has become a convention in computing, as it strikes a balance between being compact enough for data storage while being large enough to represent a reasonable variety of information, such as characters in ASCII encoding. Each additional bit doubles the amount of data that can be represented, making 8 bits capable of representing 256 different values (from 0 to 255).