Liquidity providers deposit funds into Clipper and receive returns generated by Clipper’s costless diversified rebalancing liquidity pools (supply-side fees). LP yields are generated from the rebalancing process itself rather than from fees charged to traders.

Clipper is a non-custodial exchange protocol built on Ethereum. Clipper was built by Shipyard Software and launched in 2021.

AdmiralDAO and SAIL token holders own and govern the protocol. They currently receive all trading fees paid by traders (revenue). Clipper's investors include Polychain, Robot Ventures, 0x Labs, etc.

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Clipper

# Clipper Expenses Methodology

## 1. Overview

The expenses metric for Clipper measures token incentives paid out by the protocol to users or liquidity providers. This metric represents operational costs in the form of token distributions or rewards that reduce the protocol's treasury or token supply. For Clipper, the expenses are explicitly set to zero, indicating that the protocol does not currently operate token incentive programs.

## 2. Data sources

The expenses calculation leverages the same data infrastructure as the fees calculation to maintain consistency in timestamps and dimensional structure:

- **Subgraph events**: Parsed swap events from Clipper's subgraphs including `ExchangeInterfaceV1SwappedV1Event` from Ethereum and `DirectExchangeV1SwappedV1Event` from Polygon
- **API data**: Scraped swap transaction data from Clipper's API covering Ethereum, Polygon, Optimism, and Arbitrum chains
- **End-of-day price feeds**: Token price data for USD conversion during finalization
- **Token metadata**: Token symbols, decimal places, and address mappings for proper data processing

## 3. Step-by-step calculation

### Component A: Fees model structure extraction
- **Purpose**: Extract the dimensional structure (timestamps, chains, products) from the fees calculation to ensure consistent reporting periods
- **Logic**: The calculation references the fees model to inherit its timestamp boundaries, chain coverage, and product dimensions. This ensures that expenses are reported for the same time periods and chains as other metrics, maintaining data consistency across the dashboard
- **Key fields**: `timestamp` (daily boundaries), `timestamp_grain` (day), `chain_id` (standardized chain identifiers), `product_id` (null for Clipper)

### Component B: Zero token incentives assignment  
- **Purpose**: Set all token incentive values to zero across all reporting dimensions
- **Logic**: For each combination of timestamp, chain, and product from the fees model structure, assign a value of zero to the `token_incentives` field. This hardcoded assignment indicates that Clipper does not currently operate token incentive programs or distribute rewards to users
- **Key fields**: `token_incentives` (set to 0 for all records)

### Component C: Standard metric finalization
- **Purpose**: Apply consistent data quality checks, gap filling, and schema standardization
- **Logic**: The finalization process validates that all required identifiers are present, fills any gaps in the time series using the 'fill_zeros' strategy, and ensures the output matches the standard expenses metric schema
- **Key fields**: All dimension fields plus standardized metric metadata

### Final aggregation
- **Combining components**: No aggregation is needed since token incentives are uniformly zero
- **Currency conversion**: Not applicable since all values are zero, but the finalization framework maintains USD denomination consistency
- **Time aggregation**: Data is aggregated to daily boundaries to match standard reporting intervals
- **Final calculation**: The token incentives value (zero) is renamed to `expenses` to match the standard expenses metric naming convention. The final result shows zero expenses for all time periods and chains where Clipper operates.

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

Total project operating and incentive expenses.

ClipperSAIL

Expenses

Expenses

Competitive landscape

Chain breakdown