Market makers offer trades through order book & make money on bid-ask spreads (supply-side fees).

dYdX is a non-custodial trading and derivatives protocol initially built on Ethereum and later expanded to their own blcokchain built on top of the Cosmos SDK. dYdX was founded by Antonio Juliano and launched in 2017.

DYDX tokenholders own and govern the protocol. dYdX Trading Inc. currently takes all of the total trading fees paid by traders (revenue). dYdX’s investors include a16z, Polychain, The Spartan Group, etc.

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dYdX

# dYdX Average revenue per user (ARPU) Methodology

## 1. Overview

ARPU (Average Revenue Per User) measures the average revenue generated per daily active user on the dYdX protocol. This metric is calculated by dividing total daily protocol revenue by the number of unique daily active users. The calculation combines revenue from multiple dYdX versions (dYdX V3 on StarkEx, dYdX V4 on native dYdX chain) and counts unique users across all protocol interactions including trading and transaction activities.

## 2. Data sources

The ARPU calculation relies on several key data sources:

- **dYdX chain transaction logs**: Native blockchain transaction records containing user addresses, fees, and tips
- **dYdX chain message events**: Event logs from the native chain capturing user interactions and trading activities
- **dYdX dYdX V4 match events**: Trading match events containing maker/taker information and fee data in USDC quantum units
- **dYdX API trading data**: Hourly trading fee data scraped from dYdX APIs for historical dYdX V3 activities
- **Manual historical data**: Team-provided fee amounts for early 2023 period to correct API data gaps
- **Legacy revenue data**: Historical revenue data synced via Fivetran for dYdX V3 StarkEx period
- **End-of-day token price feeds**: CoinGecko price data for USD conversion of native token fees

## 3. Step-by-step calculation

### Component A: Revenue calculation
- **Purpose**: Aggregate all protocol revenue sources and convert to USD
- **Logic**: Combines fees from multiple dYdX versions and data sources. For dYdX V4 native chain, extracts transaction fees and tips from blockchain transaction logs, plus trading fees from match events. For dYdX V3 StarkEx, uses API-scraped trading fees, manual historical corrections, and legacy Fivetran data. All fees are treated as 100% protocol revenue since dYdX captures all trading fees while market makers are compensated through bid-ask spreads. Converts all amounts to USD using end-of-day price feeds, with dYdX V4 fees already USDC-denominated requiring only decimal adjustment (dividing by 10^6)
- **Key fields**: `transaction_fee`, `transaction_tip`, `taker_order_fee_raw`, `maker_order_fee_raw`, `fee_amount` from various sources, all aggregated to daily `revenue` amounts in USD

### Component B: Daily active user counting  
- **Purpose**: Count unique users across all dYdX protocol interactions
- **Logic**: Identifies unique daily active users from multiple sources using HyperLogLog for efficient counting. Captures transaction senders from dYdX chain message events where `event_type = 'message'`, extracting user addresses from `event_attributes.sender`. Also includes makers and takers from dYdX V4 trading match events, extracting `maker_subaccount` and `taker_subaccount` from match event attributes. Aggregates unique users across different user types (transaction senders, makers, takers) and chains using HyperLogLog merge operations to avoid double-counting users who appear in multiple categories
- **Key fields**: `user_address` from transaction senders, `maker_subaccount` and `taker_subaccount` from match events, aggregated to daily `user_dau` counts using HyperLogLog

### Final aggregation
- **Combining components**: Revenue and user data are joined on daily timestamps, with both components pre-aggregated to daily totals
- **Currency conversion**: All revenue amounts converted to USD using end-of-day CoinGecko price feeds, applied after decimal normalization
- **Time aggregation**: Both revenue and user counts truncated to daily boundaries using `timestamp_trunc(timestamp, day)` for consistent alignment
- **Final calculation**: ARPU computed by dividing total daily revenue in USD by total daily active users, with zero-fill strategy applied to ensure continuous time series without gaps

## Critical implementation details

- **Fee source prioritization**: Manual historical data overrides API data for January-March 2023 period where API values were incorrect
- **dYdX V4 quantum conversion**: Trading fees from dYdX V4 match events stored as quantum units requiring division by 10^6 for USDC amounts  
- **User deduplication**: HyperLogLog ensures users appearing as both transaction senders and traders are counted only once
- **Chain separation**: Maintains separate tracking for StarkEx dYdX V3 and native dYdX chain dYdX V4 activities while combining for total ARPU
- **Revenue definition**: 100% of trading fees treated as protocol revenue since dYdX model differs from traditional DEX revenue sharing

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

dYdXDYDX

Average revenue per user (ARPU)

Average revenue per user (ARPU)

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