Validators process transactions and receive fees from users (supply-side fees).

Flow is a smart contract platform for decentralized applications (a blockchain). Flow was founded by Roham Gharegozlou, Dieter Shirley and Mikhael Naayem and launched in 2019.

FLOW holders own and govern the protocol. They currently don’t take a cut of the total transaction fees paid by users (revenue). Flow’s investors include a16z, Coatue, Coinfund, Fabric Ventures, etc.

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Flow

# Flow Average fees per user (AFPU) Methodology

## 1. Overview

Average Fees Per User (AFPU) measures the average amount of fees paid per daily active user on the Flow blockchain ecosystem. This metric answers the question "How much does each user contribute in fees on average per day?" and is calculated by dividing total daily fees by the number of daily active users. The metric combines data from both Flow EVM (the Ethereum Virtual Machine layer) and Flow Cadence (the native Flow execution environment) to provide a comprehensive view of user fee contribution across the entire Flow ecosystem.

## 2. Data sources

The AFPU calculation relies on several raw data sources:
- **Flow EVM transaction data**: Contains transaction records with gas usage (`gas_used`), gas pricing (`gas_price`), and user addresses (`from_address`)
- **Flow Cadence transaction data**: Includes transaction records with direct fee amounts (`fee_amount`), payer addresses (`payer`), and proposal key addresses (`proposal_key_address`)
- **End-of-day price feeds**: FLOW token price data from CoinGecko for USD conversion
- **Blockchain transaction logs**: Raw transaction events from both Flow EVM and Flow Cadence execution environments
- **Token metadata**: Flow token contract information including the native FLOW token address and decimals

## 3. Step-by-step calculation

### Component A: Flow EVM user identification
- **Purpose**: Identifies unique daily active users from Flow EVM transactions
- **Logic**: Extracts user addresses from the `from_address` field of Flow EVM transaction records. Each transaction's `block_timestamp` is truncated to day boundaries to group users by date. Users are classified with product_id as 'Flow EVM', user_type as 'user', and chain as 'Flow EVM' for proper categorization in the aggregation process.
- **Key fields**: `block_timestamp`, `from_address` (mapped to `user_address`), `transaction_hash`

### Component B: Flow cadence user identification  
- **Purpose**: Identifies unique daily active users from Flow Cadence transactions
- **Logic**: Extracts user addresses from both `payer` and `proposal_key_address` fields of Flow Cadence transaction records, treating each as separate user interactions. The union of these address types ensures comprehensive user coverage. Timestamps are truncated to daily boundaries and users are classified with product_id as 'Flow' and user_type as 'user'.
- **Key fields**: `block_timestamp`, `payer` (mapped to `user_address`), `proposal_key_address` (mapped to `user_address`), `transaction_hash`

### Component C: Flow EVM fee calculation
- **Purpose**: Calculates gas fees paid in Flow EVM transactions
- **Logic**: Computes gas fees by multiplying `gas_used` by `gas_price` and dividing by 1e18 to convert from wei units to FLOW tokens. These native FLOW amounts are then converted to USD using the standard conversion macro that applies end-of-day FLOW token prices. Daily aggregation sums all gas fees by timestamp, token address, and chain.
- **Key fields**: `gas_used`, `gas_price`, `token_address` ('0xd3bf53dac106a0290b0483ecbc89d40fcc961f3e'), `block_timestamp`

### Component D: Flow cadence fee calculation
- **Purpose**: Calculates transaction fees from Flow Cadence operations
- **Logic**: Uses the direct `fee_amount` values from Flow Cadence transaction records, which are already denominated in FLOW tokens. These amounts are manually converted to USD by joining with FLOW token price data from CoinGecko price feeds and multiplying the fee amount by the corresponding daily price. Daily aggregation sums all transaction fees by timestamp.
- **Key fields**: `fee_amount`, `block_timestamp`, `token_address` ('A.1654653399040a61.FlowToken')

### Component E: Daily active user aggregation
- **Purpose**: Combines and deduplicates users across Flow EVM and Flow Cadence
- **Logic**: Unions the user data from both Flow components and applies HyperLogLog (HLL) aggregation to handle deduplication of users who may appear in both ecosystems. The HLL approach enables accurate distinct counting across large datasets. Users are aggregated by day with breakdowns by chain, user type, and product dimensions to support various analytical views.
- **Key fields**: `timestamp`, `user_address` (mapped to `user_dau`), `chain`, `product_id`, `user_type`

### Component F: Fee aggregation and USD conversion
- **Purpose**: Combines fees from both Flow components in a common USD denomination
- **Logic**: Unions the USD-converted fees from Flow EVM (processed through automated conversion macro) and Flow Cadence (manually converted using price feeds). The combined fee stream is aggregated daily and processed through the finalize_metric_fees macro to ensure schema compliance and handle any missing data points with zeros.
- **Key fields**: `timestamp`, `fees` (in USD), `chain_id`, `product_id`, `token_address`

### Final aggregation
- **Combining components**: The calculate_arpu macro takes the total daily fees metric and daily active users metric as inputs, performing a division operation (fees ÷ users) to compute the average fees per user for each day
- **Currency conversion**: All fees are converted to USD using end-of-day FLOW token prices, ensuring consistent denominaton across both Flow EVM (automated conversion) and Flow Cadence (manual conversion) fee streams
- **Time aggregation**: Daily boundaries are established by truncating timestamps to day level, with all metrics aggregated and aligned to the same daily granularity
- **Final calculation**: The final AFPU value represents the total USD fees collected across both Flow EVM and Flow Cadence divided by the total unique daily active users across both ecosystems, providing a unified view of average user fee contribution per day

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

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Average fees per user (AFPU)

Average fees per user (AFPU)

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