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

Merkle Trade is a non-custodial perpetual exchange protocol built on Aptos.

MKL tokenholders own and govern the protocol. They do currently take a cut of the total trading fees paid by traders (revenue). Merkle Trade's investors include Arrington Capital, Hashed, etc.

twitter

discord

website

github

Derivative exchanges

Merkle Trade

# Merkle Trade Revenue Methodology

## 1. Overview

The Merkle Trade revenue metric measures the total daily revenue earned by the protocol from trading activities on the Aptos blockchain. Revenue consists of two main components: protocol fees from trading activity (development and staking portions) and referral rebates paid to users. This metric captures the protocol's ability to generate income from its decentralized trading platform, excluding fees that are distributed to liquidity providers.

## 2. Data sources

- **Aptos blockchain events**: Parsed `FeeDistributor_DepositFeeEvent` event logs from Merkle Trade's fee distributor contract that capture fee distributions across different recipient categories
- **Aptos blockchain events**: Parsed `Referral_RebateEvent` event logs from Merkle Trade's referral system contract that track rebate payments to users
- **External data**: End-of-day price feeds for lzUSDC token to enable USD conversion
- **Token metadata**: Decimal precision information for lzUSDC token to ensure proper unit conversion

## 3. Step-by-step calculation

### Component A: Fee distribution revenue
- **Purpose**: Captures protocol revenue from trading fees, specifically the portions allocated to development and staking rewards
- **Logic**: Extracts data from Aptos `FeeDistributor_DepositFeeEvent` events, which contain three fee amounts: `lp_amount` (liquidity provider fees), `stake_amount` (staking rewards), and `dev_amount` (development fees). Only `stake_amount` and `dev_amount` are considered protocol revenue, as `lp_amount` is distributed to liquidity providers rather than retained by the protocol. Events are filtered to the lzUSDC token address, which serves as the primary collateral token for Merkle Trade
- **Key fields**: `block_timestamp` for time attribution, `stake_amount` and `dev_amount` for revenue calculation, `token_address` hardcoded to lzUSDC identifier

### Component B: Referral rebate revenue  
- **Purpose**: Captures revenue from referral rebates paid through the protocol's referral system
- **Logic**: Extracts data from Aptos `Referral_RebateEvent` events that record rebate payments made to users who refer new traders. Each event contains a `rebate` amount denominated in lzUSDC. These rebates represent additional revenue generated by the protocol through its referral program
- **Key fields**: `block_timestamp` for time attribution, `amount` (from `rebate` field) for revenue calculation, `token_address` hardcoded to lzUSDC identifier

### Final aggregation
- **Combining components**: The two revenue components are combined using a union operation, with both streams aggregated to daily level by summing amounts within each day, chain, and token combination
- **Currency conversion**: lzUSDC amounts are converted to USD using end-of-day price feeds, with decimal correction applied to handle the token's native decimal precision
- **Time aggregation**: All revenue is aggregated to daily boundaries using timestamp truncation to day level
- **Final calculation**: The final revenue value equals the sum of daily fee distribution revenue (development fees plus staking fees) plus daily referral rebate revenue, converted to USD with proper decimal handling and zero-filled for any missing days in the time series

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

fees * take_rate (illustrative — revenue is observed directly per project, not derived from take_rate)

Fee revenue retained after supply-side payouts. Before cost of revenue (e.g. L2 DA fees) and before operating expenses.

Merkle TradeMKL

Archived

Revenue

Revenue

Competitive landscape