Users deposit funds into Circle account and receive USDC or EUROC at a 1:1 rate.

Circle is a financial technology company that is the principal architect of USDC and EUROC - full-reserve fiat stablecoins that bring US dollar and euro liquidity on-chain.

Circle is a private company registered in the US. Circle's investors include Goldman Sachs, Baidu, and IDG Capital etc.

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Circle

# Circle Fees Methodology

## 1. Overview

Fees is measured as the total economic value paid by users to interact with Circle's products, including USD Coin, Euro Coin, CCTP V2, StableFX, and Arc. These fees are generated from reserve interest, cross-chain transfers, transaction gas, and trading activities. The metric is used to assess the overall economic activity and revenue-generating capacity of the ecosystem. All values are normalized to USD using end-of-day price feeds.

## 2. Data sources

- **Blockchain events**: `MintAndWithdraw` events from `TokenMessenger` and `TokenMessengerV2` contracts, `TradeStatusChanged`, `TakerRefunded`, and `MakerRefunded` events from `FxEscrow` contracts, and `recordTrade` and `authorizeTrade` function calls from `FxEscrow` contracts, covering Ethereum, Arbitrum, Avalanche, Base, and 11 other chains
- **Outstanding supply**: Derived from the Outstanding supply metric
- **External data**: End-of-day price feeds for assets, historical US Treasury Bill rates, Federal Reserve effective interest rates, and published reserve disclosures

## 3. Step-by-step calculation

### Component A: Historical USD Coin reserve yield estimation (Pre-December 11, 2024)

- **Purpose**: Estimate historical fees generated from USD Coin reserve holdings.
- **Logic**: Outstanding supply of USD Coin is multiplied by a factor of 0.8 to determine the interest-bearing portion of the reserves. This interest-bearing supply is multiplied by the daily US Treasury Bill rate and divided by 365 to calculate daily estimated fees.
- **Key fields**: `outstanding_supply` (USD Coin supply), `tbill` (historical Treasury Bill rate)

### Component B: Programmatic reserve yield calculation (Post-December 10, 2024)

- **Purpose**: Calculate programmatic fees generated from reserve holdings using active interest rates.
- **Logic**: Reserve balances for yield-generating assets are extracted from fund holdings disclosures. Daily fees are calculated by multiplying the amortized cost or market value of these assets by the daily effective interest rate published by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, divided by 365. For periods prior to December 11, 2024, daily fees are derived directly from published reserve disclosures.
- **Key fields**: `amount` (amortized cost or market value of holdings), `rate_percentage` (effective interest rate)

### Component C: Reserve yield allocation by chain

- **Purpose**: Distribute calculated reserve yield fees across supported blockchains.
- **Logic**: Total daily reserve yield fees are allocated to individual chains proportionally based on each chain's share of the total outstanding circulating supply of USD Coin. Bridged balances are excluded from this allocation.
- **Key fields**: `outstanding_supply` (circulating supply per chain), `fees` (total reserve yield fees)

### Component D: CCTP V2 fee collection

- **Purpose**: Capture fees collected from cross-chain transfers via CCTP V2.
- **Logic**: `MintAndWithdraw` events are parsed from `TokenMessenger` and `TokenMessengerV2` contracts. Collected fee amounts are extracted, normalized by decimal precision, and converted to USD using end-of-day price feeds.
- **Key fields**: `fee_collected` (raw fee amount), `token_address` (asset identifier)

### Component E: Arc gas fee calculation

- **Purpose**: Capture transaction gas fees paid on the Arc chain.
- **Logic**: Gas fees are extracted from transaction records on Arc. Since gas is paid in USD Coin, the fee is calculated by multiplying gas used by the effective gas price and normalizing by decimal precision to yield the USD value directly.
- **Key fields**: `gas_used` (units of gas consumed), `gas_price` (price per unit of gas)

### Component F: StableFX trade fee extraction

- **Purpose**: Capture trading fees collected from the StableFX product.
- **Logic**: Settled trades are identified by parsing `TradeStatusChanged` events with a settled status from `FxEscrow` contracts, matching them with `recordTrade` or `authorizeTrade` function calls, and excluding refunded trades identified via `TakerRefunded` and `MakerRefunded` events. Taker and maker fees are extracted, normalized by decimal precision, converted to USD using end-of-day price feeds, and aggregated.
- **Key fields**: `taker_fee` (fee paid by taker), `maker_fee` (fee paid by maker), `taker_fee_token_address` (taker fee asset), `maker_fee_token_address` (maker fee asset)

### Component G: Final aggregation

- **Purpose**: Combine all fee components into a single daily metric.
- **Logic**: Estimated historical reserve fees, programmatic reserve fees, CCTP V2 fees, Arc gas fees, and StableFX fees are summed by day, chain, and product.
- **Key fields**: `fees` (aggregated USD value)

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

Total value users pay to use a protocol (gross fees, user-paid fees).

Circle

Fees

Fees

Competitive landscape

Chain breakdown