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

Curve is a non-custodial exchange protocol built originally on Ethereum. Curve was founded by Michael Egorov and launched in 2020.

CRV tokenholders own and govern the protocol. They currently take a cut of the total trading fees paid by traders (revenue). 

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Curve

# Curve Earnings Methodology

## 1. Overview

Curve earnings represents the protocol's net profit, calculated as total revenue minus total expenses. This metric measures Curve's profitability across its decentralized exchange (DEX), crvUSD stablecoin, and voting incentive business lines. The calculation aggregates trading fees, borrowing fees, and incentive payments as revenue, then subtracts token-based liquidity mining expenses to determine net earnings.

## 2. Data sources

- **Curve pool state snapshots**: Daily snapshots of pool virtual prices, XCP profits, and protocol fee tiers from Curve's state management system
- **Ethereum blockchain events**: Parsed contract events from Curve V1 and V2 protocols including fee collections, token transfers, and gauge deposits
- **Token transfer events**: Ethereum `Transfer` events specifically for CRV token distributions from minting activities
- **Lido rebase events**: `PostTotalShares` events from Lido V1 Oracle contract and `TokenRebased` events from Lido V2 stETH contract for rebasing token adjustments
- **Function call traces**: Ethereum transaction traces for reward token deposits to Curve gauges
- **Pool registry data**: Curve pool and gauge registration information to validate legitimate protocol contracts
- **End-of-day price feeds**: Daily token price data for USD conversion across all supported tokens and chains
- **Token metadata**: Token decimals, symbols, and contract addresses for proper value normalization

## 3. Step-by-step calculation

### Component A: DEX trading fee revenue
- **Purpose**: Calculate revenue from trading fees on Curve's automated market maker pools
- **Logic**: Extract daily state snapshots for each pool including virtual prices for stable pools and XCP profit values for volatile pools. For stable pools, calculate daily APR as the percentage change in `virtual_price` from previous day, filtering out outliers above 0.05% threshold. For volatile pools, calculate APR using the average of `xcp_profit` and `xcp_profit_a` values compared to previous day. For pools containing rebasing tokens like stETH, subtract the rebasing token APR (calculated from Lido rebase events) to isolate trading-specific returns. Multiply each pool's APR by its previous day total value locked to estimate daily fee generation. Apply protocol fee tier (extracted from state data, defaulting to 100% if null) to determine the portion retained by the protocol versus distributed to liquidity providers
- **Key fields**: `virtual_price`, `xcp_profit`, `xcp_profit_a`, `protocol_fee_tier`, pool `net_deposits`

### Component B: crvUSD borrowing fee revenue  
- **Purpose**: Calculate revenue from interest and fees on crvUSD stablecoin borrowing
- **Logic**: Sum all `CollectFees` events from the Curve Controller contract on Ethereum. These events represent fees collected from crvUSD borrowers and deposited into the protocol treasury. Extract the `amount` field from each event and convert to USD using end-of-day crvUSD pricing
- **Key fields**: `amount` from `CollectFees` events

### Component C: Voting incentive revenue
- **Purpose**: Calculate revenue from bribes and incentives paid for gauge vote directing
- **Logic**: Extract all `deposit_reward_token` function calls made to Curve gauge contracts registered in the GaugeController. These represent payments made by protocols to incentivize CRV holders to direct emissions to specific pools. Filter to only include gauges that are registered in the official GaugeController to exclude unrelated contracts. Sum the `amount` values for all reward token deposits and convert to USD
- **Key fields**: `_amount` from `deposit_reward_token` function calls, `token_address`, `account_address`

### Component D: Token incentive expenses
- **Purpose**: Calculate the cost of CRV token distributions for liquidity mining rewards
- **Logic**: Extract all CRV token `Transfer` events where the `from_address` is the null address, indicating minting events for liquidity rewards. These transfers represent the protocol's cost of incentivizing liquidity provision. Filter transfers to those occurring after August 12, 2020 when the rewards program began. Sum all minted CRV amounts and convert to USD using end-of-day CRV prices
- **Key fields**: `value` from CRV `Transfer` events, `from_address`, `token_address`

### Final aggregation
- **Combining components**: Sum all revenue components (DEX trading fees, crvUSD fees, voting incentives) by day and chain. Sum all expense components (token incentives) by day and chain. Calculate earnings as total revenue minus total expenses for each day
- **Currency conversion**: All token amounts are converted to USD using end-of-day price feeds, with proper decimal correction based on each token's decimal places. Native ETH is normalized to WETH for consistent pricing
- **Time aggregation**: All data is aggregated to daily boundaries using timestamp truncation to day level. State-based data uses the last available value for each day
- **Final calculation**: Earnings equals the sum of DEX revenue, crvUSD revenue, and voting incentive revenue, minus the sum of all token incentive expenses, calculated daily and filled forward for missing data points

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

Net profit (also profits, net income, profitability) — revenue remaining after subtracting expenses.

CurveCRV

Earnings

Earnings

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