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

BNB Chain is a smart contract platform for decentralized applications (a blockchain). BNB Chain was founded by Changpeng Zhao and launched in 2020.

BNB holders own and govern the protocol. They currently take a cut of the total transaction fees paid by users (revenue).

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BNB Chain

# BNB Chain Earnings Methodology

## 1. Overview

BSC earnings represents the net profit generated by the BNB Smart Chain (BSC) ecosystem, including both the BSC L1 blockchain and its associated opBNB L2 scaling solution. The metric is calculated by subtracting total operating expenses from total revenue, providing insight into the overall profitability of the BSC network operations. This metric answers the business question: "What is the net economic value generated by the BSC ecosystem after accounting for operational costs?"

The calculation follows a standard earnings formula: Earnings = Revenue - Expenses, where revenue comes from fee burns and gas fees collected across both chains, while expenses primarily consist of L1 settlement costs for the opBNB L2 solution.

## 2. Data sources

The calculation utilizes several key blockchain data sources:

- **BSC blockchain transaction data**: Complete transaction records from the BNB Smart Chain including gas usage, gas prices, and transaction metadata
- **opBNB blockchain transaction data**: Transaction records from the opBNB L2 chain including both L1 and L2 gas fee components
- **BSC ValidatorSet event logs**: Parsed `feeBurned` events from the BSC ValidatorSet contract that track fee burns
- **End-of-day token price feeds**: Daily closing prices for BNB and wrapped BNB (WBNB) tokens for USD conversion
- **Token metadata**: Information about BNB and WBNB tokens including decimal precision and contract addresses

## 3. Step-by-step calculation

### Component A: BSC L1 revenue calculation
- **Purpose**: Calculate revenue from fee burns on the BSC L1 chain
- **Logic**: Extract `feeBurned` events from the BSC ValidatorSet contract, which represent fees that are permanently removed from circulation rather than paid to validators. These events contain an `amount` field representing the BNB burned. The data is filtered to only include events from the ValidatorSet contract address and aggregated daily by truncating timestamps to day boundaries. The burned amounts are summed for each day to get total daily fee burns.
- **Key fields**: `amount` (burned BNB amount), `block_timestamp` (event timing), `address` (ValidatorSet contract)

### Component B: opBNB L2 revenue calculation  
- **Purpose**: Calculate revenue from gas fees collected on the opBNB L2 chain
- **Logic**: Process opBNB transaction data to calculate both L2 execution fees and L1 data availability fees. For L2 fees, multiply `gas_used` by `gas_price` and divide by 10^18 to convert from wei to BNB. For L1 fees, multiply `l1_gas_used` by `l1_gas_price` and `l1_fee_scalar`, then divide by 10^18. Both fee components are summed together for each transaction, then aggregated daily. This captures the total revenue generated from users paying for transaction execution and data posting.
- **Key fields**: `gas_used`, `gas_price` (L2 execution costs), `l1_gas_used`, `l1_gas_price`, `l1_fee_scalar` (L1 data costs)

### Component C: opBNB settlement cost calculation
- **Purpose**: Calculate the cost of settling opBNB transactions on BSC L1
- **Logic**: Identify transactions sent by the opBNB sequencer address to BSC L1 for data settlement. Extract gas costs by multiplying `gas_used` by `gas_price` plus any blob gas costs (multiplying `blob_gas_used` by `blob_gas_price`). Convert total gas costs from wei to BNB by dividing by 10^18. These represent the actual costs incurred by the opBNB protocol for posting transaction data to the L1 chain for security and data availability.
- **Key fields**: `gas_used`, `gas_price`, `blob_gas_used`, `blob_gas_price` (settlement transaction costs), `to_address` (filtered for sequencer)

### Component D: Token incentive calculation
- **Purpose**: Account for any token-based incentive payments
- **Logic**: Set token incentives to zero for BSC, as the protocol does not currently distribute token incentives. This component exists to maintain consistency with the earnings calculation framework but contributes no value to the final calculation.
- **Key fields**: Fixed zero value

### Final aggregation
- **Combining components**: Revenue is calculated by summing BSC L1 fee burns and opBNB L2 gas fees. Expenses are calculated by summing opBNB settlement costs and token incentives (zero). The final earnings equals total revenue minus total expenses.
- **Currency conversion**: All BNB amounts are converted to USD using end-of-day price feeds, with proper decimal correction applied where needed (dividing by 10^18 for wei conversions already handled in gas calculations)
- **Time aggregation**: All data is aggregated to daily boundaries using timestamp truncation, ensuring consistent daily reporting across all components
- **Final calculation**: Daily earnings = (Daily BSC fee burns + Daily opBNB gas fees) - (Daily opBNB settlement costs + Daily token incentives), all values in USD

*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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