Foundation enables users to mint and sell their digital art and earn royalties in return (supply-side fees). The platform takes a fee for each successful trade (revenue). 

Foundation aims to build a new creative economy by empowering artists, collectors and other users to buy, sell, and participate in live auctions for various digital pieces of art.

Foundation is a NFT marketplace, featuring live auctions, built on Ethereum. The platform was founded by 
Kayvon Tehranian and it was launched in February 2021. 

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Foundation

# Foundation Expenses Methodology

## 1. Overview

The Foundation expenses metric measures the total token incentives paid out by the Foundation NFT marketplace protocol. This metric represents the cost of user acquisition and retention through token-based rewards programs. Currently, Foundation does not operate any token incentive programs, so this metric consistently returns zero values while maintaining the same time series structure as the platform's fee collection data.

## 2. Data sources

The calculation uses the following underlying data sources:
- **Foundation marketplace events**: Parsed Ethereum event logs from Foundation's v1 smart contracts, including secondary market sales events (`Market_ReserveAuctionFinalized`, `Market_PrivateSaleFinalized`, `Market_BuyPriceAccepted`, `Market_OfferAccepted`) and primary drop mint events (`NFTDropMarket_MintFromFixedPriceDrop`)
- **End-of-day token price feeds**: USD price data for WETH token conversion
- **Token metadata**: Decimal precision and symbol information for proper amount calculations
- **Transaction data**: Ethereum transaction hashes, block timestamps, and log indices for event tracking

## 3. Step-by-step calculation

### Component A: Secondary market fee collection
- **Purpose**: Establishes the time series structure by collecting fees from secondary NFT marketplace transactions
- **Logic**: Extracts fee data from four types of Foundation marketplace events on Ethereum. For reserve auctions, private sales, buy price accepted, and offer accepted events, the system captures protocol fees, creator fees, and owner fees. The logic conditionally combines protocol fees with creator fees only when owner fees are zero to avoid double-counting scenarios. All amounts are denominated in WETH tokens with transaction timestamps truncated to daily boundaries.
- **Key fields**: `protocol_fee_amount`, `creator_fee_amount`, `owner_fee_amount`, `block_timestamp`, `transaction_hash`

### Component B: Primary drop fee collection  
- **Purpose**: Captures fees from primary NFT mint events during fixed-price drops
- **Logic**: Processes mint events from Foundation's NFT drop marketplace contract, extracting protocol fees paid during primary sales. These represent the platform's cut from initial NFT mints rather than secondary market trades. Timestamps are truncated to daily boundaries and amounts are in WETH tokens.
- **Key fields**: `protocol_fee_amount`, `block_timestamp`, `transaction_hash`

### Component C: Token incentives calculation
- **Purpose**: Calculates token-based user incentives using the fee time series structure
- **Logic**: Takes the complete time series structure from the combined fee data (secondary plus primary) but sets all token incentive values to exactly zero. This approach maintains consistent daily data points across the same time periods and chain coverage as fee collection while reflecting Foundation's current policy of not operating token incentive programs.
- **Key fields**: `timestamp`, `timestamp_grain`, `product_id`, `chain_id`, `token_incentives`

### Final aggregation
- **Combining components**: The expenses metric directly equals the token incentives values from Component C, inheriting the zero values while preserving the complete time series structure
- **Currency conversion**: Although token incentive values are zero, the underlying fee structure uses end-of-day USD conversion rates and corrects for WETH's 18 decimal places to maintain consistency with other Foundation metrics
- **Time aggregation**: Daily boundaries are established using timestamp truncation to day level, ensuring consistent daily reporting periods
- **Final calculation**: Expenses = Token incentives = 0 for all time periods, maintaining daily granularity and chain-specific reporting structure aligned with Foundation's fee collection timeline

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

Total project operating and incentive expenses.

Foundation

Expenses

Expenses

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