Validators process transactions and receive fees from users (supply-side fees).

Kusama is a security & interoperability platform for blockchains and applications. Kusama was founded by Gavin Wood and launched in 2019.

KSM holders own and govern the protocol. They currently take a cut of the total transaction fees paid by users (revenue).

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Blockchains (L1)

Kusama

# Kusama Average revenue per user (ARPU) Methodology

## 1. Overview

ARPU (Average Revenue Per User) measures the average revenue generated per daily active user on the Kusama blockchain. This metric provides insights into user monetization efficiency by dividing the protocol's daily revenue by the number of distinct daily active users. The calculation treats transaction senders as active users and considers 80% of network fees as protocol revenue.

## 2. Data sources

The ARPU calculation relies on three primary raw data sources:
- **Kusama blockchain extrinsics**: Transaction records from the Kusama network containing user addresses, block timestamps, and transaction identifiers
- **Kusama network fees**: Raw fee data from the Kusama blockchain including balance amounts and timestamps for all fee-generating activities
- **End-of-day price feeds**: KSM token price data from CoinGecko for USD conversion using the `kusama` coingecko identifier

## 3. Step-by-step calculation

### Component A: Daily active user identification
- **Purpose**: Identifies and counts unique daily active users on Kusama
- **Logic**: Extracts user addresses from Kusama extrinsics data, treating all transaction senders as active users. Block timestamps are truncated to daily boundaries and distinct user addresses are counted per day using HyperLogLog aggregation for computational efficiency. Users are classified as "Transaction sender" type and categorized under the "blockchains_l2" market sector
- **Key fields**: `id` (user address), `block_timestamp` (transaction time), `extrinsic_id` (transaction identifier)

### Component B: Fee collection and aggregation  
- **Purpose**: Collects and processes network fees from Kusama blockchain activities
- **Logic**: Retrieves raw fee data containing `balance_amount_total` values and converts from the smallest KSM unit (12 decimal places) to full KSM tokens by dividing by 10^12. Duplicate fees are removed and remaining fees are aggregated daily by summing all fee amounts within each day boundary
- **Key fields**: `balance_amount_total` (raw fee amount), `timestamp` (fee collection time), `fees` (processed KSM fee amount)

### Component C: Revenue calculation
- **Purpose**: Determines protocol revenue from collected fees
- **Logic**: Takes the aggregated daily fees in KSM and converts them to USD using end-of-day CoinGecko price feeds. Applies an 80% fee cut to determine protocol revenue, meaning revenue equals fees multiplied by 0.8. This reflects the portion of fees that constitute actual protocol revenue versus network operational costs
- **Key fields**: `fees` (daily fee total), `revenue` (80% of fees in USD)

### Final aggregation
- **Combining components**: Daily revenue values are divided by corresponding daily active user counts for the same timestamp boundaries. Both components use daily timestamp truncation to ensure proper alignment
- **Currency conversion**: KSM fees are converted to USD using end-of-day CoinGecko price feeds before revenue calculation
- **Time aggregation**: All data is aggregated to daily boundaries using timestamp truncation, with missing days filled with zero values
- **Final calculation**: ARPU equals daily revenue (in USD) divided by daily active user count, providing the average revenue generated per active user each day

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

KusamaKSM

Average revenue per user (ARPU)

Average revenue per user (ARPU)

Competitive landscape