Liquidity providers deposit funds into Cap and receive trading fees from traders (supply-side fees).

Cap is a non-custodial exchange for perpetual contracts built on Arbitrum. Cap was founded by an anonymous team and launched in 2021.

CAP token holders own and govern the protocol. They currently take a cut of trading fees paid by traders (revenue).

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# Cap Expenses Methodology

## 1. Overview

Cap protocol expenses represent the total USD value of token incentives (primarily ARB tokens) distributed to traders on the Cap perpetual trading platform. This metric measures the protocol's cost of incentivizing trading activity and user acquisition. The calculation aggregates daily reward claims from Cap's reward distribution contract on Arbitrum and converts them to USD values.

## 2. Data sources

- **Blockchain events**: Parsed `RewardClaimed` events from Cap protocol v4's reward distribution contract on Arbitrum blockchain
- **External data**: End-of-day token price feeds for USD conversion of claimed reward tokens
- **Token metadata**: Token contract information including decimal precision for proper amount calculations

## 3. Step-by-step calculation

### Component A: Raw reward claims extraction
- **Purpose**: Extracts individual token reward claims made by Cap traders
- **Logic**: Processes parsed `RewardClaimed` events from Cap's reward distribution contract on Arbitrum. Each event captures when a trader claims their earned ARB token rewards. The extraction includes the claiming account address, reward token address, claimed amount in raw blockchain units, and block timestamp. Events are classified under the perpetual trading business line and derivatives market sector.
- **Key fields**: `block_timestamp` for timing, `address` for the claiming account, `token_address` for the reward token (typically ARB), and `amount` for the claimed quantity in raw token units

### Component B: Daily aggregation and USD conversion
- **Purpose**: Aggregates daily reward claims and converts token amounts to USD values
- **Logic**: Groups individual reward claims by day using timestamp truncation to daily boundaries. For each day, token amounts are converted from raw blockchain units to properly decimaled amounts using token metadata, then converted to USD using end-of-day price feeds. The aggregation maintains chain identity, business classification, and version information.
- **Key fields**: `timestamp` truncated to daily boundaries, `token_incentives` representing the USD value of rewards claimed per day, and `chain_id` for Arbitrum identification

### Final aggregation
- **Combining components**: Daily USD-converted token incentive amounts flow directly to the final expenses calculation without additional aggregation
- **Currency conversion**: Token amounts are converted to USD using end-of-day price feeds, with proper decimal adjustment based on token metadata
- **Time aggregation**: Data is aggregated to daily boundaries, with a zero-fill strategy applied to ensure complete time series coverage for periods with no reward claims
- **Final calculation**: The final expenses metric equals the total USD value of token incentives distributed each day. The metric undergoes standard finalization to ensure consistent schema, data validation, and gap filling across the complete time series.

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

Total project operating and incentive expenses.

CapCAP

Archived

Expenses

Expenses

Competitive landscape

Chain breakdown