# Helium Fees Methodology

## 1. Overview

The Helium fees metric measures the total fees paid in the Helium wireless network through Data Credits (DC) burns. Data Credits are the utility tokens burned to pay for data transmission and other network services in Helium's decentralized wireless infrastructure. This metric tracks the daily volume of DC burns across the network's evolution from its original blockchain implementation to its migration to Solana, providing insight into network usage and revenue generation.

## 2. Data sources

The calculation draws from multiple data sources reflecting Helium's technological evolution:

- **Legacy Helium blockchain data**: Pre-aggregated daily revenue data from the original Helium blockchain captured by the v1 scraper system
- **Helium v2 scraper data**: Raw fees data collected from the Helium network during the transition period
- **Solana instruction events**: Specific Solana blockchain instruction events that burn Data Credits, including `BurnDelegatedDataCreditsV0` and `BurnWithoutTrackingV0` instructions
- **Historical aggregations**: Previously calculated daily totals from legacy systems for continuity across network migrations

## 3. Step-by-step calculation

### Component A: Legacy v1 scraper burns (until June 16, 2021)
- **Purpose**: Captures DC burns from the earliest period of Helium network operation using pre-aggregated daily data
- **Logic**: Retrieves daily revenue totals from the legacy v1 scraper system. This data represents aggregated DC burns that were already calculated and stored as daily totals. Each record includes the daily timestamp and total revenue amount for that day.
- **Key fields**: Uses `daily_timestamp` for date and `revenue` field as the burn amount, with business categorization as wireless networks infrastructure

### Component B: V2 scraper burns (June 16, 2021 to April 17, 2023)
- **Purpose**: Captures DC burns during the transition period using the v2 scraper system
- **Logic**: Extracts raw fees data from the v2 scraper system, which collected more granular fee information compared to the v1 system. This covers the period between the legacy system and the Solana migration.
- **Key fields**: Uses `timestamp` for date and `total` field as the burn amount, maintaining the same business categorization structure

### Component C: Solana instruction-based burns (after April 17, 2023)
- **Purpose**: Captures individual DC burn transactions from specific Solana instruction types after network migration
- **Logic**: Processes two specific types of Solana instructions that burn Data Credits. The `BurnDelegatedDataCreditsV0` instruction handles burns on behalf of other accounts, while `BurnWithoutTrackingV0` handles direct burns without detailed tracking. Each instruction event represents an individual DC burn transaction.
- **Key fields**: Uses `block_timestamp` for timing and `amount_raw` for the burn amount. The raw amount is divided by 100,000 to convert from the smallest Data Credits unit to the standard DC denomination.

### Final aggregation
- **Combining components**: All three data sources are union-ed together to create a complete historical timeline, with each period covering its respective date range without overlaps
- **Currency conversion**: No currency conversion is applied as Data Credits are the native unit of measurement for Helium network fees
- **Time aggregation**: Data is aggregated by day using timestamp truncation, with each day representing the total DC burns across all network activities
- **Final calculation**: The final metric value represents the sum of all Data Credits burned per day, standardized across the different historical periods and data collection methods. The finalize_metric_fees macro ensures consistent schema structure and fills any gaps with zero values to maintain complete daily time series data.

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

Total value users pay to use a protocol (gross fees, user-paid fees).

Fees

Helium

Supply-side users deploy and maintain hotspots which provide wireless coverage. Demand-side users use the wireless network for data transfer. Users pay a fee for data transfer (demand-side user) and a fee for hotspot related transactions (supply-side user). Hotspots receive inflationary rewards (token incentives).

Helium is a protocol for building and using decentralized wireless infrastructure. Helium was founded by Shawn Fanning, Amir Haleem & Sean Carey and launched in 2019.

HNT holders own and govern the protocol. They currently receive all of the total data transfer and transaction fees paid by users (revenue). Helium’s investors include a16z, Multicoin Capital, Alameda Research, etc.

HeliumHNT

Fees

Fees

Competitive landscape