Liquidity providers deposit funds into GMX and receive trading fees from traders (supply-side fees).

GMX is a non-custodial exchange for spot and perpetual contracts, live on Arbitrum, Avalanche, MegaETH and Solana. GMX was founded by an anonymous team and launched in 2021.

GMX token holders own and govern the protocol. On the EVM deployments they take a cut of the total trading fees paid by traders (revenue), split between GMX buybacks and the treasury. On Solana the protocol's share accrues to that deployment's treasury rather than to GMX token holders.

governance

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Derivative exchanges

# GMX Expenses Methodology

## 1. Overview

Expenses is calculated as the total cost GMX incurs to operate its business, specifically focusing on asset incentives distributed to users. These expenses are comprised of GMX asset rewards distributed through vesting contracts to traders and stakers, as well as ARB incentives distributed under the Short-Term Incentive Proposal (STIP). The tracking of these expenses is utilized to evaluate the net profitability and asset emission sustainability of the GMX protocol.

## 2. Data sources

- **Blockchain events**: `BatchSend` events from `BatchSender` contracts, and ERC-20 `Transfer` events from vesting contracts, covering Arbitrum and Avalanche
- **External data**: End-of-day price feeds and asset metadata for GMX and ARB assets

## 3. Step-by-step calculation

### Component A: Vesting incentive extraction

- **Purpose**: Capture GMX asset incentives claimed through vesting contracts
- **Logic**: ERC-20 `Transfer` events are parsed on Arbitrum and Avalanche. Transfers of escrowed GMX (esGMX) from designated vesting contract addresses to the null address (representing the burning of esGMX during the vesting process) are identified. The corresponding value of the transferred asset is recorded as GMX incentives distributed to traders and stakers
- **Key fields**: `from_address` (vesting contract), `to_address` (null address), `token_address` (esGMX address), `value` (incentive amount)

### Component B: STIP ARB incentive extraction

- **Purpose**: Capture ARB incentives distributed under the Short-Term Incentive Proposal
- **Logic**: `BatchSend` events from `BatchSender` contracts are parsed on Arbitrum. Transactions where the input asset matches the ARB asset address are filtered. The individual distribution amounts are extracted by unnesting the array of input amounts from the event data
- **Key fields**: `token_address` (representing the ARB asset address), `amounts` (array of distributed amounts)

### Component C: Normalization and USD conversion

- **Purpose**: Standardize incentive amounts to USD
- **Logic**: The extracted incentive amounts for GMX and ARB are normalized by their respective decimal precisions using asset metadata. The normalized amounts are then multiplied by the end-of-day asset prices to determine the USD value. Daily values are aggregated with UTC day boundaries
- **Key fields**: `timestamp` (timing), `expenses` (calculated USD value)

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

Total project operating and incentive expenses.

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Expenses

Expenses

Competitive landscape

Chain breakdown