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 Revenue Methodology

## 1. Overview

Flow protocol revenue measures the fees collected by the Flow blockchain that represent actual protocol income rather than payments to network validators. Flow implements a unique "Inflation Offset" economic model where validator rewards are fixed per epoch, and fees collected during the epoch are used to offset the inflation that would otherwise be needed to pay these rewards. The metric combines revenue from two distinct execution environments: Flow (the native Flow runtime) where all fees count as protocol revenue, and Flow EVM (the Ethereum Virtual Machine layer) where fees go to validators as supply-side payments and contribute zero to protocol revenue.

## 2. Data sources

The revenue calculation relies on several key data sources:

- **Flow blockchain transaction records**: Native Flow Cadence transaction data including pre-calculated fee amounts, payer addresses, transaction hashes, block timestamps, and gas limits
- **Flow EVM blockchain transaction records**: Ethereum Virtual Machine compatible transaction data on Flow including gas usage, gas prices, transaction hashes, from/to addresses, and block timestamps  
- **Flow staking reward event logs**: Parsed `RewardsPaid` and `DelegatorRewardsPaid` events from Flow's staking contracts showing validator and delegator reward distributions
- **End-of-day Flow token price feeds**: Daily FLOW token prices in USD used for currency conversion
- **Flow token metadata**: Token contract addresses, symbols, and decimal configurations for proper data processing

## 3. Step-by-step calculation

### Component A: Flow revenue calculation
- **Purpose**: Calculate protocol revenue from native Flow Cadence transaction fees, which fully count as revenue under Flow's inflation offset model
- **Logic**: Raw Flow transaction records are filtered to exclude null fee amounts, then aggregated daily by summing the `fee_amount` field across all transactions. The aggregation also calculates supplementary metrics including average fees, median fees, transaction counts, and unique payer counts. These native FLOW fee amounts are then converted to USD using end-of-day Flow token prices through a left join operation, with missing prices defaulting to zero
- **Key fields**: `fee_amount` (pre-calculated transaction fee in native FLOW), `block_timestamp` (used for daily aggregation), `payer` (transaction fee payer for uniqueness counting)

### Component B: Flow EVM fee processing  
- **Purpose**: Process Flow EVM gas fees but attribute zero revenue since these fees go to Flow validators as supply-side payments
- **Logic**: Flow EVM transaction records are processed to calculate gas fees using the formula (gas_used × gas_price) ÷ 10^18 to convert from wei to FLOW tokens. These fees are aggregated daily and converted to USD using standard token price conversion macros. However, in the final revenue attribution, Flow EVM explicitly contributes zero revenue regardless of the fee amounts calculated, because the economic model routes these fees to validators rather than the protocol treasury
- **Key fields**: `gas_used` (gas consumed by transaction), `gas_price` (price per gas unit in wei), `block_timestamp` (for daily aggregation)

### Component C: Revenue attribution logic
- **Purpose**: Apply Flow's unique economic model to determine which fees count as protocol revenue versus validator payments
- **Logic**: Flow implements an "Inflation Offset" model where validator rewards are fixed per epoch and fees collected offset the inflation needed to pay these rewards. Under this model, all Flow fees represent reduced inflation burden and therefore count as protocol revenue. Flow EVM fees, however, are directed to Flow validators as supply-side payments and contribute zero to protocol revenue. This creates an asymmetric revenue attribution where one execution layer generates revenue while the other generates validator income
- **Key fields**: Product identification fields (`Flow` vs `Flow EVM`) determine revenue attribution rules

### Final aggregation
- **Combining components**: Flow revenue (converted to USD) is combined with Flow EVM revenue (always zero) through a union operation that preserves the daily timestamp grain and product-level granularity
- **Currency conversion**: Native FLOW amounts are converted to USD using end-of-day Flow token price feeds, with null prices defaulting to zero to handle missing data gracefully
- **Time aggregation**: All fees are aggregated to daily boundaries using timestamp truncation to day level, ensuring consistent time series alignment across both execution environments
- **Final calculation**: Protocol revenue equals the sum of Flow fees in USD plus zero for Flow EVM fees, standardized through the finalize_metric_revenue macro which ensures proper schema formatting and fills any time gaps with zeros for complete time series data

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

fees * take_rate (illustrative — revenue is observed directly per project, not derived from take_rate)

Fee revenue retained after supply-side payouts. Before cost of revenue (e.g. L2 DA fees) and before operating expenses.

FlowFLOW

Revenue

Revenue

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