Liquidity providers deposit funds into Balancer and receive trading fees from traders (supply-side fees). In addition, Balancer provides liquidity providers with additional yield using boosted pools.

Balancer is a non-custodial exchange protocol built on Ethereum. Balancer was founded by Fernando Martinelli and launched in 2018.

BAL tokenholders own and govern the protocol. They currently take a cut of the total trading and yield fees (revenue). Balancer's investors include DeFiance Capital, Three Arrows Capital, Alameda Research, etc.

governance

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Exchanges (DEX)

Balancer

# Balancer Fees Methodology

## 1. Overview

This metric calculates the total fees generated by Balancer protocol across all supported blockchain networks. The calculation combines two primary fee sources: flashloan fees charged on flashloan transactions and protocol fees collected from trading activities. The metric answers the business question "How much fee revenue does Balancer generate?" and uses a comprehensive approach that tracks both direct flashloan fees and reverse-engineered protocol fees from on-chain fee collection events.

## 2. Data sources

The calculation relies on several types of blockchain data and external feeds:

- **Balancer protocol events**: Parsed `Vault_FlashLoan_event` logs from Balancer V2 contracts across Ethereum, Arbitrum, Avalanche, Base, Gnosis, Optimism, and Polygon networks
- **Pool balance events**: Parsed `Vault_PoolBalanceChanged_event` logs that capture protocol fee collections in tokens
- **Pool registration events**: Parsed `Vault_PoolRegistered_event` logs for identifying pool LP token addresses
- **Token transfer events**: Cross-chain token transfer logs filtered to the protocol fee collector address `0xce88686553686da562ce7cea497ce749da109f9f`
- **Fee tier updates**: Parsed `ProtocolFeesCollector_FlashLoanFeePercentageChanged_event` and `ProtocolFeesCollector_SwapFeePercentageChanged_event` logs tracking protocol fee percentage changes over time
- **Transaction data**: Blockchain transaction records for user address identification
- **Token metadata**: Token symbols and decimal precision data
- **External price feeds**: End-of-day token price feeds for USD conversion

## 3. Step-by-step calculation

### Component A: Flashloan fee calculation
- **Purpose**: Captures fees charged directly on flashloan transactions
- **Logic**: Extracts `Vault_FlashLoan_event` logs across all seven supported chains, joins with transaction data to get user addresses, and applies protocol fee tier filtering. Events include `token` (borrowed token), `amount` (borrowed amount), and `feeAmount` (fee charged). Data is aggregated daily by chain, pool contract, and token address. Protocol fee tiers are determined by joining with fee tier update events using time-windowed logic where the flashloan transaction ID falls between consecutive fee update IDs. Amounts are corrected for token decimals and converted to USD using end-of-day price feeds. The Gnosis stabal3 token address `0x2086f52651837600180de173b09470f54ef74910` is excluded due to data quality issues.
- **Key fields**: `token_address`, `token_amount`, `fee_amount`, `protocol_fee_tier`, `account_address` (pool contract)

### Component B: Protocol fee calculation  
- **Purpose**: Calculates total fees by reverse-engineering from collected protocol fees
- **Logic**: Combines two sources of protocol fee data. First, protocol fees paid in regular tokens are extracted from `Vault_PoolBalanceChanged_event` logs, which contain arrays of `tokens` and `protocolfeeamounts` that are unnested and joined. Second, protocol fees paid in LP tokens are identified by tracking token transfers from the null address `0x0000000000000000000000000000000000000000` to the protocol fee collector address, joined with pool registration events to identify which transfers represent LP token mints to the fee collector. All protocol fee amounts are aggregated by transaction to avoid double-counting. The total fees are then calculated by dividing the collected protocol fee amount by the applicable protocol fee tier percentage, determined through time-windowed joins with trading fee tier update events. This reverse-engineering approach works because protocol fees represent a percentage of total fees, so total fees = protocol fees / protocol fee percentage.
- **Key fields**: `amount` (collected protocol fees), `token_address`, `protocol_fee_tier`, `account_address` (pool contract)

### Final aggregation
- **Combining components**: The flashloan fees and protocol fees are combined using a union operation, with both streams having the same dimensional structure (timestamp, chain, pool address, token address, fee amount)
- **Currency conversion**: All fee amounts are converted to USD using end-of-day token price feeds matched on timestamp, chain, and token address. Amounts are first corrected for token decimals by dividing by 10^decimals before price multiplication
- **Time aggregation**: Data is aggregated to daily grain using `timestamp_trunc(block_timestamp, day)` with all fees within a day summed together
- **Final calculation**: The metric represents total daily fee revenue in USD, combining direct flashloan fees (where protocol fee tier = 0, excluding Optimism) and reverse-calculated protocol fees (protocol fee amount ÷ protocol fee tier percentage) for all other cases. Missing data is filled with zeros and filtered by chain availability rules.

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

Total value users pay to use a protocol (gross fees, user-paid fees).

BalancerBAL

Fees

Fees

Competitive landscape

Chain breakdown