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). 

governance

github

twitter

discord

etherscan

website

Exchanges (DEX)

Curve

# Curve Expenses Methodology

## 1. Overview

Curve expenses represents the daily USD value of CRV token incentives distributed to liquidity providers. The metric captures the cost of Curve's liquidity mining program by tracking CRV token distributions (minting events) and treating them as operational expenses. This measures how much Curve spends daily to incentivize liquidity provision on its platform.

## 2. Data sources

- **Ethereum ERC-20 token transfer events**: Parsed `Transfer` events from the CRV token contract on Ethereum, specifically transfers originating from the null address (token minting/distribution events)
- **End-of-day token price feeds**: CRV token prices for USD conversion
- **Token metadata**: CRV token decimal precision (18 decimals) for proper amount calculation
- **Account dimension data**: Mapping of recipient addresses to account names and chain identifiers

## 3. Step-by-step calculation

### Component A: CRV token distribution extraction
- **Purpose**: Identify all CRV token distributions that represent liquidity incentive payments
- **Logic**: Extract `Transfer` events from the CRV token contract where the `from_address` is the null address. The null address transfers represent token minting events, which in Curve's case are distributions to liquidity providers as incentives. Filter to include only transfers after August 12, 2020 when the liquidity mining program began. Capture the recipient address, transfer amount, block timestamp, and transaction details for each distribution event.
- **Key fields**: `block_timestamp` for timing, `from_address` (filtered to null address only), recipient address as `account_address`, CRV `token_address`, and raw `amount` values

### Component B: Account classification and enrichment
- **Purpose**: Map recipient addresses to known account types and add chain context
- **Logic**: Join the raw transfer events with a dimension table that classifies recipient addresses by account name and chain. Currently focused on Ethereum chain only. Add business context fields including business line ('Exchange AMM'), market sector ('exchanges'), business segment ('dex'), and version ('v1').
- **Key fields**: `account_address` for joining, `account_name` for classification, `chain` identifier, and business categorization fields

### Component C: Daily aggregation and USD conversion
- **Purpose**: Aggregate token distributions by day and convert to USD values
- **Logic**: Truncate timestamps to day level and group transfers by date, chain, and business dimensions. Sum the raw token amounts for each day. Apply decimal correction using the CRV token's 18 decimal places to convert from raw blockchain units to actual token amounts. Convert the corrected token amounts to USD using end-of-day CRV token prices.
- **Key fields**: Daily `timestamp`, `chain_id`, aggregated `token_incentives` amounts in USD

### Final aggregation
- **Combining components**: The processed daily incentive payments flow directly into the expenses metric, where `token_incentives` values are renamed to `expenses`
- **Currency conversion**: USD conversion uses end-of-day CRV token prices with proper 18-decimal adjustment for accurate valuation
- **Time aggregation**: Daily boundaries based on block timestamps truncated to day level
- **Final calculation**: Daily expenses equal the sum of all CRV token incentive distributions for that day, converted to USD. The metric represents Curve's daily operational cost for liquidity mining incentives.

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

Total project operating and incentive expenses.

CurveCRV

Expenses

Expenses

Competitive landscape

Chain breakdown