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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Blockchains (L1)

BNB Chain

# BNB Chain Expenses Methodology

## 1. Overview

The BSC expenses metric measures the total operational costs incurred by the BSC ecosystem, combining cost of revenue and token incentives. The metric primarily captures settlement costs for opBNB (BSC's Layer 2 solution) by tracking fees paid by the opBNB sequencer on the BSC mainnet. This provides insight into the actual costs of operating the L2 infrastructure and maintaining cross-chain settlement operations.

## 2. Data sources

- **BSC transaction records**: Complete transaction data from BSC mainnet including gas usage, gas prices, and blob gas components for settlement transactions
- **opBNB transaction records**: Layer 2 transaction data with both L1 and L2 gas cost components 
- **End-of-day price feeds**: BNB token price data for USD conversion of settlement costs
- **Sequencer transaction data**: BSC transactions filtered by the opBNB sequencer address to isolate settlement operations

## 3. Step-by-step calculation

### Component A: Settlement cost calculation
- **Purpose**: Calculate the cost of settling opBNB L2 transactions on BSC L1
- **Logic**: Filter BSC transaction records to identify settlements made by the opBNB sequencer address (`0xff00000000000000000000000000000000000204`). For each settlement transaction, calculate the total fee as the sum of regular gas fees (gas used multiplied by effective gas price) and blob gas fees (blob gas used multiplied by blob gas price). Convert the total fee from wei to BNB by dividing by 10^18. Aggregate these settlement costs daily using timestamp truncation to the day level.
- **Key fields**: `block_timestamp` for daily aggregation, `gas_used` and `gas_price` for regular gas costs, `blob_gas_used` and `blob_gas_price` for blob gas costs, `to_address` for sequencer filtering

### Component B: USD conversion
- **Purpose**: Convert BNB-denominated settlement costs to USD for standardized reporting
- **Logic**: Apply end-of-day BNB price feeds to convert the daily aggregated settlement costs from BNB to USD. The conversion uses the end-of-day closing price for each day to ensure consistent valuation methodology.
- **Key fields**: `l1_settlement_amount` in BNB units, converted to `cost_of_revenue` in USD

### Component C: Token incentives
- **Purpose**: Account for any token-based incentives provided by the protocol
- **Logic**: Set token incentives to zero for all time periods, as BSC and opBNB do not currently provide token-based incentives to users or validators. This component maintains the same timestamp and dimensional structure as other metrics for consistency.
- **Key fields**: `token_incentives` set to 0 for all records

### Final aggregation
- **Combining components**: Union the USD-converted settlement costs (labeled as cost of revenue) with the zero token incentives to create a comprehensive expenses metric
- **Currency conversion**: All costs converted to USD using end-of-day BNB price feeds for the settlement costs component
- **Time aggregation**: Daily aggregation boundaries using timestamp truncation to day level
- **Final calculation**: Total expenses equals cost of revenue (settlement costs in USD) plus token incentives (zero), providing the complete operational expense picture for the BSC ecosystem

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

Total project operating and incentive expenses.

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Expenses

Expenses

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Chain breakdown