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

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etherscan

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Exchanges (DEX)

Curve

# Curve Fees Methodology

## 1. Overview

The Curve fees metric measures the total daily fees generated across Curve Finance's ecosystem, including decentralized exchange (DEX) trading fees, crvUSD stablecoin fees, and voting incentive payments. The metric combines three distinct revenue streams: (1) estimated DEX trading fees calculated from pool performance and total value locked (TVL), (2) direct crvUSD fee collections from the protocol's Controller contract, and (3) voting incentive payments made through Curve's governance system. This comprehensive approach captures the full fee generation across Curve's multi-product DeFi platform.

## 2. Data sources

- **Curve pool state snapshots**: Daily snapshots of pool balances, virtual prices, profit metrics, and protocol fee tiers across all supported chains
- **Ethereum transaction traces**: Function call traces for `deposit_reward_token` on Curve Gauge contracts to capture voting incentive payments  
- **Curve Controller events**: Parsed `CollectFees` events from Curve's crvUSD Controller contract capturing direct fee collections
- **Lido staking events**: Oracle `PostTotalShares` (v1) and `TokenRebased` (v2) events for calculating stETH rebase yields
- **Token metadata**: Token symbols, decimals, and contract addresses for decimal corrections and symbol mapping
- **End-of-day price feeds**: Daily closing prices for converting all fee amounts to USD equivalents
- **Curve protocol configuration**: Pool metadata, token configurations, and gauge registry data for filtering and validation

## 3. Step-by-step calculation

### Component A: DEX trading fees

- **Purpose**: Estimates daily trading fees generated by Curve's automated market maker (AMM) pools based on pool performance and liquidity
- **Logic**: Extracts daily pool balance snapshots from state data, filtering hourly snapshots to daily granularity by selecting records where hour equals 0. Calculates daily APRs for each pool based on pool type. For stable pools, APR is derived from virtual price changes between consecutive days, with changes capped at 0.05% threshold to filter outliers. For volatile pools (tricrypto), APR is calculated from XCP profit changes, averaging `xcp_profit` and `xcp_profit_a` values with a base adjustment of 1e18. Rebasing token yields are subtracted from pool APRs, specifically stETH rebase rewards calculated from Lido Oracle events. Daily fees are estimated using the formula: previous day's TVL multiplied by the APR, then divided by the protocol fee tier. Protocol fee tier defaults to 1 if state calls return null values
- **Key fields**: `virtual_price` for stable pools, `xcp_profit` and `xcp_profit_a` for volatile pools, `net_deposits` for pool TVL, `protocol_fee_tier` for fee distribution, `apr` for daily yield calculations

### Component B: crvUSD fee collections

- **Purpose**: Captures direct fee collections from Curve's crvUSD stablecoin protocol
- **Logic**: Aggregates `CollectFees` events emitted by Curve's Controller contract on Ethereum. Events contain the fee amount in crvUSD tokens collected by the protocol. Daily aggregation sums all fee collection amounts within each day. Fee amounts are converted from crvUSD token units to USD using end-of-day price feeds and decimal corrections
- **Key fields**: `amount` from CollectFees events representing fee collections in crvUSD tokens

### Component C: Voting incentives

- **Purpose**: Tracks fees paid for voting incentives within Curve's governance system  
- **Logic**: Monitors `deposit_reward_token` function calls on Curve Gauge contracts to capture reward token deposits used as voting incentives. Function traces are filtered to only include gauges registered in Curve's GaugeController to exclude non-Curve contracts. Daily aggregation sums all reward token deposits by token type. Token amounts are converted to USD using end-of-day price feeds with appropriate decimal corrections
- **Key fields**: `amount` representing reward token deposits, `token_address` for token identification, `account_address` for gauge validation

### Final aggregation

- **Combining components**: The three fee components are combined using union operations, with each component tagged by market sector (exchanges for DEX and voting incentives, stablecoin_issuers for crvUSD) and business segment identifiers
- **Currency conversion**: All fee amounts are converted to USD using end-of-day token price feeds, with decimal corrections applied based on token metadata before price conversion
- **Time aggregation**: Daily boundary logic truncates timestamps to day-level granularity, with DEX fees using hour-0 snapshots and event-based fees aggregated by day
- **Final calculation**: The metric represents the sum of all daily fee amounts across the three components, expressed in USD, providing total daily fee generation across Curve Finance's ecosystem

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

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

CurveCRV

Fees

Fees

Competitive landscape

Chain breakdown