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.

governance

github

twitter

discord

website

Blockchains (L1)

Flow

# Flow Transaction participants (monthly) Methodology

## 1. Overview

Flow transaction participants monthly measures the unique number of active addresses that participated in transactions on the Flow blockchain over rolling 30-day periods. This metric captures comprehensive blockchain activity by tracking multiple types of participants across both Flow's native Cadence environment and its EVM-compatible layer (Flow EVM). The calculation uses HyperLogLog sketching for efficient unique address counting across extended time windows and provides dimensional breakdowns by chain, user type, and product.

## 2. Data sources

The calculation relies on four primary data sources from the Flow blockchain:

- **Flow transaction records**: Native Flow blockchain transaction data containing payer addresses, proposal key addresses, gas fees, block timestamps, and transaction hashes
- **Flow EVM transaction records**: EVM-compatible transaction data with sender addresses (`from_address`) and transaction metadata
- **Flow event logs**: Parsed blockchain events including `FungibleToken.Deposited` and `NonFungibleToken.Deposited` events with JSON payloads containing recipient address information
- **Flow collections metadata**: Transaction collection data with nested arrays of authorizer addresses who signed transactions

## 3. Step-by-step calculation

### Component A: Flow EVM user identification
- **Purpose**: Identifies active addresses from EVM-compatible transactions on Flow
- **Logic**: Extracts unique sender addresses from Flow EVM transaction records, truncates timestamps to daily boundaries, and assigns standard metadata (chain as 'Flow EVM', user_type as 'user', product_id as 'Flow EVM')
- **Key fields**: `block_timestamp`, `from_address` as user address, `transaction_hash`

### Component B: Flow participant identification  
- **Purpose**: Captures comprehensive participation in native Flow transactions across multiple roles
- **Logic**: Identifies five distinct participant types from Flow transaction and event data:
  1. **Payers**: Extract `payer` addresses from transaction records (addresses that pay transaction fees)
  2. **Proposers**: Extract `proposal_key_address` from transaction records (proposal key signers)  
  3. **Authorizers**: Unnest `authorizers` arrays from collections metadata to identify all transaction signers
  4. **Token receivers**: Parse JSON payloads from `FungibleToken.Deposited` events to extract `to` addresses, excluding FlowToken contract (1654653399040a61) since FLOW doesn't require vault setup
  5. **NFT receivers**: Parse JSON payloads from `NonFungibleToken.Deposited` events to extract `to` addresses from the standard NonFungibleToken contract (1d7e57aa55817448)
- **Key fields**: `block_timestamp`, various address fields (`payer`, `proposal_key_address`, authorizer addresses, recipient addresses from events), `user_type` classification

### Component C: Daily participant aggregation
- **Purpose**: Combines all participant types and creates daily unique address counts
- **Logic**: Unions Flow EVM users and Flow participants, deduplicates by date, user address, and user type, truncates timestamps to daily boundaries, and applies chain availability filters to ensure data quality
- **Key fields**: Daily `timestamp`, `chain`, `user_type`, `product_id`, deduplicated `user_address` as `transaction_participants_daily`

### Component D: HyperLogLog sketch preparation
- **Purpose**: Converts daily participant data into HLL sketches for efficient unique counting
- **Logic**: Initializes HyperLogLog sketches with 15-bit precision from daily unique participant sets, groups by timestamp, chain, user type, and product dimensions
- **Key fields**: `timestamp`, `chain_id`, `user_type`, `product_id`, `hll` sketch

### Component E: 30-day rolling window creation
- **Purpose**: Establishes rolling 30-day periods for monthly participant calculation
- **Logic**: Creates a datespine covering all dates from the earliest data to yesterday, generates join tables that map each date to the preceding 30 days using interval arithmetic, joins daily HLL sketches to the appropriate 30-day windows
- **Key fields**: Target `timestamp`, `joinday` for the 30-day lookback period, linked HLL sketches

### Component F: Dimensional aggregation
- **Purpose**: Creates multiple breakdowns of monthly participant counts
- **Logic**: Merges HLL sketches across 30-day windows and extracts unique counts for four dimensional breakdowns:
  1. **Project level**: Overall Flow ecosystem metrics (nulls other dimensions)
  2. **Chain level**: Breakdown by individual chain (Flow native vs Flow EVM)
  3. **User type level**: Breakdown by participant role (payer, proposer, authorizer, user, etc.)
  4. **Product level**: Breakdown by product (Flow vs Flow EVM)
- **Key fields**: `timestamp`, `dimensions` identifier, relevant dimension fields, `transaction_participants_monthly` count

### Final aggregation
- **Combining components**: Unions all dimensional breakdowns using UNION ALL to preserve all breakdown levels in a single result set
- **Time aggregation**: Uses month-level partitioning with rolling 30-day windows, where each day represents the unique participant count for the preceding 30 days
- **Final calculation**: Applies the finalize_metric_transaction_participants_monthly macro to standardize schema, handle missing data with zero-fill strategy, and ensure consistent output format across all Token Terminal metrics

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

Unique addresses participating in transactions over a rolling 30-day window.

FlowFLOW

Transaction participants (monthly)

Transaction participants (monthly)

Competitive landscape

Chain breakdown