Market makers offer trades through order book & make money on bid-ask spreads paid by takers.

0x is a non-custodial exchange protocol built on Ethereum. 0x was founded by Amir Bandeali & Will Warren and launched in 2016.

ZRX tokenholders own and govern the protocol. They currently do not take any of the total trading fees paid by traders (revenue). 0x’s investors include Coinbase Ventures, Jump Capital, Pantera Capital, etc.

governance

github

twitter

discord

etherscan

website

Exchanges (DEX)

# 0x Earnings Methodology

## 1. Overview

The 0x earnings metric measures the protocol's net earnings by calculating revenue minus expenses. 0x operates as a fee-free decentralized exchange (DEX) aggregator, meaning it doesn't charge trading fees or distribute token incentives. As a result, the earnings metric consistently equals zero, reflecting the protocol's business model of facilitating trades without generating direct revenue from fees.

## 2. Data sources

- **0x trade data**: Custom scraped transaction data from the 0x protocol containing trade information, trading volumes in USD, token pair symbols, timestamps, transaction hashes, and blockchain identifiers
- **Trading activity logs**: Transaction records capturing all trading activity across supported chains where 0x operates
- **Token pair metadata**: Information about maker and taker tokens involved in trades, including token symbols used for trade pair identification

## 3. Step-by-step calculation

### Component A: Trade data extraction
- **Purpose**: Establishes the foundation of trading activity data for the protocol
- **Logic**: Extract all trade transactions from the 0x protocol scraper data, including USD trading volumes, token pair information (maker and taker token symbols), timestamps, transaction hashes, and chain identifiers. Each trade is categorized with business metadata including business line as 'Exchange Order Book', market sector as 'exchanges', and business segment as 'dex'. The data is filtered to ensure distinct records and normalized with lowercase chain identifiers.
- **Key fields**: `volumeUSD` for trade size, `takerTokenSymbol` and `makerTokenSymbol` for token pair identification, `timestamp` for daily aggregation, `chain` for blockchain classification

### Component B: Trading volume aggregation
- **Purpose**: Aggregates individual trades into daily trading volume metrics
- **Logic**: Group trade data by day (using timestamp truncation), chain, market sector, business segment, and product. Sum the USD trading volumes for each group to create daily trading volume totals. Apply data validation and gap-filling using zero-fill strategy to ensure complete time series data.
- **Key fields**: Daily `timestamp`, `chain_id`, aggregated `trading_volume` in USD

### Component C: Fee calculation
- **Purpose**: Calculates protocol fees collected from trading activity
- **Logic**: Since 0x operates as a fee-free protocol, all fees are hardcoded to zero. The fee calculation inherits the same time and product structure as trading volumes but sets the `fees` field to 0 for all records. This reflects 0x's business model of not charging users for trades.
- **Key fields**: `fees` set to 0, matching timestamp and product structure from trading volumes

### Component D: Token incentives calculation  
- **Purpose**: Calculates token rewards or incentives distributed to users
- **Logic**: 0x does not distribute token incentives or rewards to traders, so token incentives are set to zero for all records. The calculation maintains the same dimensional structure as fees but with `token_incentives` hardcoded to 0.
- **Key fields**: `token_incentives` set to 0, maintaining timestamp and product alignment

### Component E: Expenses calculation
- **Purpose**: Aggregates all protocol expenses
- **Logic**: Calculate total expenses by taking token incentives as the primary expense component. Since token incentives equal zero, total expenses also equal zero. The expenses inherit the dimensional structure from token incentives.
- **Key fields**: `expenses` equals `token_incentives` (which is 0)

### Component F: Revenue calculation
- **Purpose**: Aggregates all protocol revenue sources
- **Logic**: Calculate total revenue by taking fees as the primary revenue source. Since fees equal zero due to 0x's fee-free model, total revenue also equals zero. The revenue calculation maintains the same time and product structure as the underlying fee data.
- **Key fields**: `revenue` equals `fees` (which is 0)

### Final aggregation
- **Combining components**: The earnings calculation combines revenue and expenses using the standard formula: earnings = revenue - expenses. Both components are joined on timestamp, chain, and product dimensions to ensure proper alignment.
- **Currency conversion**: All underlying data is already in USD from the source trading volume data, so no additional currency conversion is required
- **Time aggregation**: Data is aggregated at daily boundaries using timestamp truncation to day level
- **Final calculation**: The final earnings value equals revenue minus expenses, which results in 0 - 0 = 0 for all time periods, reflecting 0x's fee-free operating model where the protocol generates no direct earnings from trading activity

*This methodology was automatically generated by Token Terminal's methodology analyzer.*

Net profit (also profits, net income, profitability) — revenue remaining after subtracting expenses.

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