Validators process transactions and receive fees from users (supply-side fees).

Aptos is a smart contract platform for decentralized applications (a blockchain). Aptos was founded by Mo Shaikh and Avery Ching and launched in 2022.

APT token holders own and govern the protocol. They currently don’t take a cut of the total transaction fees paid by users (revenue). Aptos’ investors include Binance Labs, Jump Crypto, Apollo, etc.

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Aptos

# Aptos Earnings Methodology

## 1. Overview

The Aptos earnings metric measures the network's daily profitability by calculating the difference between revenue generated from transaction fees and expenses incurred through validator rewards. This metric answers the fundamental question: "How much profit does the Aptos network generate daily after accounting for validator incentive costs?" The calculation follows standard financial accounting principles where Earnings = Revenue - Expenses, with both components converted to USD using APT token prices.

## 2. Data sources

The calculation relies on several core data sources from the Aptos blockchain and external price feeds:

- **Aptos blockchain transaction records**: All transaction data including gas consumption (`gas_used`) and gas pricing (`gas_unit_price`) from network participants
- **Aptos blockchain event logs**: Parsed validator reward distribution events, specifically `DistributeRewardsEvent` and `DistributeRewards` events that track APT token rewards paid to validators
- **Hybrid APT price feeds**: A combination of Chainlink price feeds for recent data (starting August 10, 2023) and CoinGecko daily market data for historical periods before Chainlink availability
- **External token metadata**: APT token decimal precision information (8 decimals) used for amount calculations

## 3. Step-by-step calculation

### Component A: Revenue calculation
- **Purpose**: Calculate daily revenue from transaction fees paid by network users
- **Logic**: Extract all Aptos transactions including gas consumption metrics. Multiply `gas_used` by `gas_unit_price` to get total fee per transaction in APT tokens. Apply special handling for genesis transactions by hardcoding their timestamp to October 12, 2022. Convert gas unit prices from native precision by dividing by 10^8 to account for APT decimal places. Aggregate all transaction fees by day and convert to USD using daily APT prices
- **Key fields**: `gas_used` (computational resources consumed), `gas_unit_price` (price per gas unit in APT), `block_timestamp` (transaction timing), `transaction_hash` (unique identifiers)

### Component B: Expenses calculation  
- **Purpose**: Calculate daily expenses from validator reward payments
- **Logic**: Parse Aptos event logs to identify validator reward distribution events. Extract reward amounts from the JSON `data` field of `DistributeRewardsEvent` and `DistributeRewards` events. Convert reward amounts from native precision by dividing by 10^8 to account for APT decimal places. Extract validator pool addresses to track reward recipients. Aggregate all validator rewards by day and convert to USD using the same daily APT prices used for revenue
- **Key fields**: `event_type` (identifies reward events), `data.rewards_amount` (APT reward amount), `data.pool_address` (validator pool identifier), `block_timestamp` (event timing)

### Component C: Price conversion
- **Purpose**: Convert APT-denominated amounts to USD using historical price data
- **Logic**: Use a hybrid pricing approach that combines two sources based on data availability. For dates starting August 10, 2023, use Chainlink price feeds from contract address `0x88a98431c25329aa422b21d147c1518b34dd36f4`. For historical dates before August 10, 2023, use CoinGecko daily market data for APT (coingecko_id: 'aptos'). This creates a complete daily price series spanning the network's entire operational history
- **Key fields**: `timestamp` (daily price date), `price` (USD price per APT token), `feed_address` (Chainlink contract identifier)

### Final aggregation
- **Combining components**: Daily revenue and expense amounts are calculated separately, then combined using the earnings formula: Earnings = Revenue - Expenses. Both components use identical timestamp truncation to daily boundaries and the same APT price conversion methodology
- **Currency conversion**: All APT amounts are converted to USD using end-of-day price feeds, with multiplication operations performed after decimal precision adjustments
- **Time aggregation**: Data is aggregated to daily boundaries using timestamp truncation, with all transactions and events grouped by their respective day
- **Final calculation**: The final earnings value represents the daily net profit/loss of the Aptos network in USD, calculated as the difference between total transaction fee revenue and total validator reward expenses for each day

*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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