Liquidity providers deposit funds into Aperture and receive trading fees from traders (supply-side fees).

Aperture is a non-custodial DeFi exchange protocol built on Manta Pacific (originally a fork of Uniswap). Aperture was founded by Gao Han, Lian Zhu, and Peiqian Li in 2021.

Aperture team & investors own and govern the protocol. They do not currently take a cut of the total trading fees paid by traders (revenue). Aperture's investors include ParaFi Capital, Arrington XRP Capital, Costanoa Ventures and Divergence Ventures.

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Aperture

# Aperture Expenses Methodology

## 1. Overview

The Aperture expenses metric represents the protocol's operational expenses in the form of token incentives paid to users. For Aperture protocol, this metric is consistently zero because the protocol does not distribute token incentives to users as part of its operational model. The calculation leverages the same time series framework as other Aperture metrics but hardcodes all expense values to zero, providing a complete daily time series that accurately reflects the protocol's zero-incentive policy.

## 2. Data sources

Despite expenses being zero, the calculation uses several blockchain data sources to establish the proper time series framework:

- **AMM trading events**: Parsed `Pool_Swap_event` logs from Manta network capturing all trading activity on Aperture liquidity pools
- **Flash loan events**: Parsed `Pool_Flash_event` logs from Manta network recording flash loan transactions
- **Pool creation events**: Parsed `Factory_PoolCreated_event` logs from Manta network that define trading pairs and fee structures
- **Transaction data**: Manta blockchain transaction records providing user address information and transaction context
- **External price data**: End-of-day token price feeds for USD conversion across supported tokens
- **Token metadata**: Token information including decimal precision and symbols for proper amount calculations

## 3. Step-by-step calculation

### Component A: Trading volume calculation
- **Purpose**: Calculate daily trading volume across all Aperture liquidity pools to establish baseline activity metrics
- **Logic**: Extract all `Pool_Swap_event` logs from Manta network, join with pool metadata to identify token pairs and fee tiers, correct token amounts using decimal precision from token metadata, aggregate absolute amounts by day, and convert to USD using end-of-day price feeds. The system uses the minimum USD value between `token0_amount` and `token1_amount` to prevent price manipulation attacks
- **Key fields**: `token0_amount`, `token1_amount`, `fee_tier`, `account_address` for pool identification, and daily aggregated trading volumes

### Component B: Flash loan volume calculation  
- **Purpose**: Calculate daily flash loan volume to capture all protocol activity beyond standard trading
- **Logic**: Process `Pool_Flash_event` logs from Manta network, join with the same pool metadata for token information and fee structures, correct decimals and aggregate by day, then convert both token amounts to USD and sum them together (unlike trading volume, flash loans sum rather than take minimum to capture full borrowed amount)
- **Key fields**: `amount0` and `amount1` representing flash loan amounts, aggregated into daily USD volumes per pool

### Component C: Fee structure establishment
- **Purpose**: Create the time series framework by calculating what fees would be if they existed
- **Logic**: Combine trading volume and flash loan volume data, multiply each by the respective pool's `fee_tier` to calculate theoretical fees, aggregate across all pools and transaction types by day, and sum total fees across the protocol. This creates a complete daily time series with proper temporal boundaries
- **Key fields**: Calculated `fees` representing theoretical fee income, `timestamp`, `chain_id`, and `product_id` for proper metric structure

### Component D: Token incentives determination
- **Purpose**: Set all token incentive expenses to zero as per Aperture's operational model
- **Logic**: Take the timestamp structure and identifiers from the fees calculation but override all `token_incentives` values to zero, reflecting that Aperture protocol does not pay token rewards or incentives to users
- **Key fields**: `token_incentives` hardcoded to 0, maintaining same temporal and identifier structure as other metrics

### Final aggregation
- **Combining components**: The expenses metric directly takes the zero token incentives from component D, as expenses consist entirely of token incentive payments for this protocol
- **Currency conversion**: All values are already in USD from the underlying calculations, though actual expense values remain zero
- **Time aggregation**: Daily boundaries are maintained with proper gap-filling to ensure complete time series coverage
- **Final calculation**: Expenses equal token incentives, which equals zero for all time periods, representing Aperture's policy of not paying token incentives to users

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

Total project operating and incentive expenses.

Aperture

Expenses

Expenses

Competitive landscape

Chain breakdown