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

ApeSwap is a non-custodial exchange protocol built originally on BNB Chain. ApeSwap was founded by an anonymous team and launched in 2021.

BANANA tokenholders own and govern the protocol. They currently take a cut of the total trading fees paid by traders (revenue).

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ApeSwap

# ApeSwap Expenses Methodology

## 1. Overview

ApeSwap expenses represents the total USD value of BANANA token incentives distributed daily to users participating in ApeSwap's liquidity mining programs. This metric captures the protocol's operational expenses in the form of token rewards paid to liquidity providers and stakers across multiple programs on BSC and Polygon chains. The calculation treats all distributed token incentives as protocol expenses, following standard accounting principles where reward distributions represent operational costs.

## 2. Data sources

The calculation draws from several blockchain and external data sources:

- **BSC token transfer events**: Parsed BANANA token `Transfer` events on Binance Smart Chain, specifically filtering transfers from reward account addresses to identify legitimate incentive distributions
- **BSC contract events**: Parsed events from ApeSwap's liquidity mining contracts including `Deposit` and `Withdraw` events from MasterApe v1, MasterApeV2, and GNANAPool contracts
- **Polygon contract events**: Parsed `Harvest` events from the MiniApeV2 contract on Polygon network
- **Token mint events**: Special BANANA token mint transactions to the deprecated reward account, used for validation filtering
- **End-of-day price feeds**: Daily closing prices for BANANA token to enable USD conversion
- **Token metadata**: BANANA token contract information including decimal precision (18 decimals)

## 3. Step-by-step calculation

### Component A: Valid reward transaction identification
- **Purpose**: Filters legitimate BANANA token reward distributions from internal or non-reward transfers
- **Logic**: Extracts BSC token transfer events where the sender address matches one of three specific reward accounts (liquidity incentives v1 at `0x86ef5e73edb2fea111909fe35afcc564572acc06`, liquidity incentives v2 at `0x71354ac3c695dfb1d3f595afa5d4364e9e06339b`, or gold banana incentives at `0x8f97b2e6559084cfaba140e2ab4da9aaf23fe7f8`) and the token address is BANANA (`0x603c7f932ed1fc6575303d8fb018fdcbb0f39a95`). This creates a validated list of transactions where actual rewards were distributed.
- **Key fields**: `transaction_hash` for joining with contract events, `to_address` for recipient validation, `amount` for reward quantity

### Component B: Mint validation for legacy rewards
- **Purpose**: Identifies BANANA token creation events for the deprecated reward account to validate early liquidity incentives
- **Logic**: Filters BSC token transfers where the sender is the null address (`0x0000000000000000000000000000000000000000`) and recipient is the deprecated reward account (`0x86ef5e73edb2fea111909fe35afcc564572acc06`). These mint events serve as an allowlist for validating MasterApe v1 reward distributions before the account migration date.
- **Key fields**: `transaction_hash` for validation joins, `value` for mint amount limits

### Component C: Deposit-based incentive distributions
- **Purpose**: Captures BANANA rewards distributed when users deposit liquidity into farming pools
- **Logic**: Joins contract `Deposit` events from MasterApe v1, MasterApeV2, and GNANAPool with valid reward transactions. For MasterApe v1 (before January 26, 2023), also joins with mint validation data and takes the minimum of deposit amount and mint value to prevent overcounting. For MasterApeV2 (after migration date), uses the reward transaction amount directly. Applies denylist filtering to exclude internal transactions for specific pool IDs (75, 112, 162, 190, 206). Validates that the deposit user matches the reward recipient address.
- **Key fields**: `block_timestamp` for daily aggregation, `user` as reward recipient, `pid` for pool identification, `amount` for reward quantity

### Component D: Withdrawal-based incentive distributions  
- **Purpose**: Captures BANANA rewards distributed when users withdraw liquidity from farming pools
- **Logic**: Similar to deposits, joins contract `Withdraw` events with valid reward transactions. For MasterApe v1, uses mint validation and takes minimum amounts. For MasterApeV2, includes additional filtering to exclude withdrawals where the withdrawal amount equals the reward amount (indicating no reward was distributed). Applies the same denylist and timestamp-based filtering as deposits.
- **Key fields**: `block_timestamp` for daily aggregation, `user` as reward recipient, `amount` for reward quantity

### Component E: Harvest claim distributions
- **Purpose**: Captures BANANA rewards claimed through the MiniApeV2 harvest mechanism on Polygon
- **Logic**: Directly processes `Harvest` events from the MiniApeV2 contract on Polygon, using the event's amount field as the reward distribution. No additional validation joins are required as these events inherently represent reward claims.
- **Key fields**: `block_timestamp` for daily aggregation, `amount` for claimed reward quantity

### Final aggregation
- **Combining components**: All incentive distributions from deposits, withdrawals, and harvests are combined using union operations, creating a comprehensive list of daily BANANA token reward distributions across all programs and chains
- **Currency conversion**: Raw BANANA amounts are converted to USD using end-of-day price feeds, with proper decimal adjustment for BANANA's 18-decimal precision
- **Time aggregation**: Transaction timestamps are truncated to day boundaries and grouped for daily totals
- **Final calculation**: The daily sum of all USD-converted BANANA incentive distributions becomes the expenses value, representing the protocol's daily operational cost in token rewards

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

Total project operating and incentive expenses.

ApeSwapABOND

Expenses

Expenses

Competitive landscape

Chain breakdown