Building a Simple Currency Converter in React with useState and useMemo

One of the best ways to learn React is by building small, practical projects. A currency converter is an excellent example because it introduces state management, user input handling, calculations, and performance optimization—all in a single application.

I built a simple currency converter using React that converts from USD to EUR, GBP, and JPY. For simplicity, I used fixed exchange rates instead of calling a live exchange rate API.

React applications are interactive because they can respond to user actions. The useState hook allows components to remember values between renders.

For this project, I declared it as thus,

const [amount, setAmount] = useState(1);