OP Mainnet batches users' transactions and submits them to Ethereum, paying a share of the transaction fees to Ethereum validators (expense).

OP Mainnet is an L2 smart contract platform for decentralized applications on Ethereum. OP Mainnet was founded by Jinglan Wang, Karl Floersch & Kevin Ho and launched in 2021.

Optimism team & investors own and govern the protocol. Optimism’s investors include Paradigm, a16z, IDEO CoLab Ventures, etc.

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OP Mainnet

# OP Mainnet Expenses Methodology

## 1. Overview

Optimism expenses represent the total daily operational costs incurred by the Optimism protocol, combining L1 settlement fees paid to Ethereum and token incentive distributions to users and developers. This metric answers the question "What does it cost Optimism to operate daily?" by aggregating two primary expense categories: the cost of settling transactions on Ethereum Layer 1 and the value of OP token rewards distributed to ecosystem participants.

## 2. Data sources

- **Ethereum transaction records**: Complete transaction data including gas usage and prices for L1 settlement transactions
- **Ethereum event logs**: Parsed `StateCommitmentChain_StateBatchAppended_event` and `CanonicalTransactionChain_SequencerBatchAppended_event` logs for pre-bedrock settlement identification
- **Optimism token transfer events**: Parsed `Transfer` events for OP token distributions from reward and foundation addresses
- **End-of-day token price feeds**: USD pricing data for WETH and OP tokens used in currency conversion
- **Token metadata**: Decimal precision information for accurate token amount calculations

## 3. Step-by-step calculation

### Component A: L1 settlement cost calculation (cost of revenue)

- **Purpose**: Calculate the gas fees Optimism pays to Ethereum for L1 data availability and settlement
- **Logic**: The calculation differs between pre-bedrock and post-bedrock periods. For pre-bedrock (before June 6, 2023), transactions are identified using an allowlist of specific transaction hashes from `StateCommitmentChain_StateBatchAppended_event` and `CanonicalTransactionChain_SequencerBatchAppended_event` logs. For post-bedrock, transactions are identified by specific to/from address pairs: transactions to `0xff00000000000000000000000000000000000010` from `0x6887246668a3b87f54deb3b94ba47a6f63f32985` (sequencer) and transactions to `0xdfe97868233d1aa22e815a266982f2cf17685a27` (L2 output oracle) from `0x473300df21d047806a082244b417f96b32f13a33` (state root proposer). Gas fees are calculated as `receipt_gas_used` multiplied by `receipt_effective_gas_price` divided by 10^18 to convert from wei to ETH. Daily aggregation sums all settlement costs by chain and token address.
- **Key fields**: `receipt_gas_used`, `receipt_effective_gas_price`, `block_timestamp`, `transaction_hash`, `to_address`, `from_address`

### Component B: Token incentive calculation

- **Purpose**: Calculate the USD value of OP token rewards distributed to ecosystem participants
- **Logic**: Extract OP token transfers from two primary distribution addresses: the reward address `0x19793c7824be70ec58bb673ca42d2779d12581be` and the foundation address `0x2501c477d0a35545a387aa4a3eee4292a9a8b3f0`. Only transfers of the OP token (`0x4200000000000000000000000000000000000042`) are included. The calculation excludes transfers to internal addresses including foundation, treasury, and known exploiter addresses to focus on genuine external distributions. Raw token amounts are extracted from transfer events and aggregated daily by transaction.
- **Key fields**: `value`, `from_address`, `to_address`, `token_address`, `block_timestamp`, `transaction_hash`

### Final aggregation

- **Combining components**: The two expense components are combined using a union operation, with cost of revenue and token incentives treated as separate expense types within the same schema structure
- **Currency conversion**: Both components undergo USD conversion using end-of-day token price feeds. The conversion applies decimal correction for token amounts (enabled for OP tokens, disabled for WETH which is already in 18 decimals) and multiplies by the appropriate USD price
- **Time aggregation**: All data is aggregated to daily granularity using timestamp truncation to day boundaries, with amounts summed within each day
- **Final calculation**: The final expenses metric represents the sum of daily L1 settlement costs (in USD) plus daily token incentive distributions (in USD), with gap filling using a zero-fill strategy to ensure continuous time series data and chain availability filtering applied to maintain data quality standards

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

Total project operating and incentive expenses.

OP MainnetOP

Expenses

Expenses

Competitive landscape

Chain breakdown