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

Cardano is a smart contract platform for decentralized applications (a blockchain). Cardano was founded by Charles Hoskinson & Jeremy Wood and launched in 2017.

ADA holders own and govern the protocol. They currently do not take a cut of the total transaction fees paid by users (revenue).

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Blockchains (L1)

Cardano

# Cardano Expenses Methodology

## 1. Overview

The value of assets distributed as staking rewards is measured by Cardano Expenses. The protocol's operating costs are represented by these token incentives, which are paid to stake pool operators and delegators for securing the network. Staking rewards issued for the maintenance of the Proof-of-Stake consensus mechanism are captured within this metric.

## 2. Data sources

- **Blockchain events**: Epoch-level staking reward data captured from on-chain records, covering Cardano
- **External data**: End-of-day price feeds for the native ADA asset

## 3. Step-by-step calculation

### Component A: Epoch reward extraction

- **Purpose**: Identify the total volume of staking rewards generated during each network epoch.
- **Logic**: Total reward amounts are extracted from epoch-level data records. Values are normalized from lovelace by decimal precision to the native ADA asset. Duplicate epoch records are filtered based on the epoch sequence and start time to ensure data integrity.
- **Key fields**: `total_rewards` (reward quantity), `epoch` (period identification)

### Component B: Daily reward distribution

- **Purpose**: Align epoch-based rewards with daily reporting boundaries.
- **Logic**: Total rewards from each Cardano epoch are distributed evenly across the five days of the epoch duration. Each day within the epoch is assigned one-fifth of the total rewards issued during that period. This distribution is applied to handle the boundary between distinct epochs.
- **Key fields**: `start_time` (epoch commencement), `staking_rewards_ada` (epoch total)

### Component C: USD conversion and final aggregation

- **Purpose**: Normalize reward values to USD and aggregate by date.
- **Logic**: Daily native asset amounts are multiplied by end-of-day asset price feeds. The final values are aggregated by day with UTC day boundaries. Missing data points are zero-filled to maintain a continuous time-series for the metric.

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

Total project operating and incentive expenses.

CardanoADA

Expenses

Expenses

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