Lenders deposit funds into BENQI and receive interest payments from borrowers (supply-side fees).

BENQI is a non-custodial lending protocol built on Avalanche. BENQI was founded by an international team of software developers and launched in 2021.

 QI tokenholders own and govern the protocol. They currently take a cut of the total interest paid by borrowers (revenue). BENQI’s investors include Dragonfly Capital, Mechanism Capital, Spartan, etc.

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Lending

BENQI

# BENQI Expenses Methodology

## 1. Overview

BENQI expenses represents the total USD value of token incentives distributed to users as rewards for lending and staking activities on the BENQI protocol. This metric captures the protocol's operational expenses related to incentivizing user participation through token distributions. The calculation aggregates two types of incentive distributions: lending rewards distributed through the BENQI Comptroller contract and staking rewards distributed from the dedicated staking contract.

## 2. Data sources

- **Avalanche token transfer events**: Token transfers from the BENQI staking contract that distribute QI tokens as staking rewards
- **BENQI v1 Comptroller events**: Parsed `DistributedBorrowerReward` and `DistributedSupplierReward` events from the BENQI v1 Comptroller contract on Avalanche
- **End-of-day token price feeds**: USD price data for QI tokens and WAVAX tokens used for currency conversion
- **Token metadata**: Decimal precision data for proper token amount normalization

## 3. Step-by-step calculation

### Component A: Staking incentives extraction
- **Purpose**: Captures token incentives distributed through the BENQI staking mechanism
- **Logic**: Identifies token transfers where the sender is the BENQI staking contract address `0x784da19e61cf348a8c54547531795ecfee2affd1` and the token being transferred is the QI token `0x8729438eb15e2c8b576fcc6aecda6a148776c0f5`. These transfers represent staking rewards distributed to users and are classified as lending business line expenses.
- **Key fields**: `block_timestamp` for timing, `transaction_hash` and `log_index` for uniqueness, `value` for the raw token amount, and hardcoded business classification fields

### Component B: Token incentive distribution events
- **Purpose**: Captures lending incentives distributed through the BENQI Comptroller contract
- **Logic**: Extracts `DistributedBorrowerReward` and `DistributedSupplierReward` events from the BENQI v1 Comptroller contract. The `tokenType` field determines the reward token: when `tokenType` equals 0, rewards are in QI tokens; otherwise rewards are in WAVAX tokens. The `qiDelta` field contains the raw reward amount distributed to users.
- **Key fields**: `block_timestamp` for timing, `transaction_hash` and `log_index` for uniqueness, `qiDelta` for reward amounts, `tokenType` for token identification, and business classification fields

### Component C: Token incentives aggregation
- **Purpose**: Combines staking and lending incentives into a unified dataset
- **Logic**: Unions the staking incentives and token incentive distributions, standardizing the schema with daily timestamp truncation. All records are classified under the lending business line and market sector, with version marked as v1.
- **Key fields**: `timestamp` (daily), `chain_id` (avalanche), business classification fields, `token_address`, and `token_incentives` amounts

### Component D: USD conversion and decimal correction
- **Purpose**: Converts raw token amounts to USD values with proper decimal handling
- **Logic**: Applies decimal correction using token metadata to convert raw blockchain amounts to their proper decimal representations, then converts to USD using end-of-day token price feeds. This handles the difference between raw blockchain integers and human-readable token amounts.
- **Key fields**: USD-denominated `token_incentives` values with correct decimal precision

### Final aggregation
- **Combining components**: The incentive data flows through a single pipeline from raw events to final aggregation
- **Currency conversion**: All token amounts are converted to USD using end-of-day price feeds after decimal correction
- **Time aggregation**: Data is aggregated at daily boundaries using timestamp truncation to day level
- **Final calculation**: The total daily expenses equal the sum of all USD-converted token incentive distributions, with gaps filled using zeros for days without incentive activity and chain availability filtering applied to ensure only supported chain data is included

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

Total project operating and incentive expenses.

BENQIQI

Expenses

Expenses

Competitive landscape