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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Kusama

# Kusama Transaction count Methodology

## 1. Overview

The Kusama transaction count metric measures the total number of unique transactions (called "extrinsics" in Kusama terminology) processed on the Kusama blockchain network per day. This metric provides insight into daily network activity and adoption by counting each unique transaction exactly once, regardless of its complexity or gas consumption. The calculation uses daily time boundaries and includes gap-filling logic to ensure consistent time series data.

## 2. Data sources

The calculation relies on the following raw data sources:
- **Kusama blockchain extrinsics**: Raw transaction records from the Kusama network containing unique transaction identifiers and execution details
- **Kusama block timestamps**: Block-level timestamp data indicating when each transaction was included in a block on the Kusama blockchain
- **Chain metadata**: Static configuration data identifying Kusama as a layer-2 blockchain in the blockchains market sector

## 3. Step-by-step calculation

### Component A: Raw transaction extraction
- **Purpose**: Extract and standardize raw Kusama transaction data
- **Logic**: The system retrieves raw extrinsic records from Kusama blockchain data, casting the `block_timestamp` to a standardized timestamp format and the `extrinsic_id` to a string format for consistent processing. Each record represents a unique transaction on the Kusama network with its execution timestamp.
- **Key fields**: `block_timestamp` (when the transaction was included in a block), `extrinsic_id` (unique identifier for each transaction), `chain_id` (set to 'kusama')

### Component B: Daily transaction aggregation  
- **Purpose**: Group transactions by day and count unique transactions
- **Logic**: The system truncates the `block_timestamp` to day granularity, creating daily time boundaries. Within each day, it counts distinct `extrinsic_id` values to determine the total number of unique transactions. This ensures each transaction is counted exactly once even if there are duplicate records. The aggregation also assigns metadata including chain identifier, market sector classification, and business segment categorization.
- **Key fields**: `timestamp` (truncated to day), `transaction_count` (count of distinct extrinsic IDs), `chain_id`, `market_sector_id`, `business_segment_id`

### Final aggregation
- **Combining components**: The daily transaction counts are processed through a finalization macro that standardizes the output schema, validates data integrity, and ensures temporal consistency
- **Currency conversion**: Not applicable for transaction count metrics
- **Time aggregation**: Data is aggregated to daily boundaries using day-level timestamp truncation, with incremental processing logic that looks back a configurable number of days to handle late-arriving data
- **Final calculation**: The final metric value is the count of distinct `extrinsic_id` values for each day, with any missing days filled with zero values to maintain complete time series data. Chain availability filtering ensures only days with reliable data coverage are included in the final output.

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

Confirmed transactions added to the blockchain.

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Transaction count

Transaction count

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