Liquidity providers deposit funds into Perpetual Protocol to earn a share of trading fees (supply-side fees). Perpetual Protocol leverages Uniswap v3's architecture as a pricing engine, enabling traders to access up to 10x leverage. Perpetual Protocol also offers Hot Tub vaults, which operate trading strategies that generate yield from arbitrage profits. 

Perpetual Protocol is an open-source and non-custodial exchange for perpetual contracts built on Optimism. Perpetual Protocol was founded by Shao-Kang Lee & Yenwen Feng and launched in 2019.

PERP token holders own and govern the protocol. Token holders can boost their governance power and earn 15% of trading fees paid by traders (revenue) by locking PERP into vote-escrowed PERP (vePERP). Perpetual Protocol's investors include CMS Holdings, Binance Labs, and Mechanism Capital.

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Perpetual Protocol

# Perpetual Protocol Average fees per user (AFPU) Methodology

## 1. Overview

The Average Fees Per User (AFPU) metric measures the average daily fee revenue generated per active user on Perpetual Protocol. This metric answers the question "How much fee revenue does each active user generate on average per day?" and is calculated by dividing total daily fees by the number of daily active users. The calculation covers both Perpetual Protocol v1 (on Gnosis chain) and v2 (on Optimism chain), including both trading fees from position changes and liquidation fees.

## 2. Data sources

The AFPU calculation relies on the following raw data sources:

- **Blockchain events**: Parsed Perpetual Protocol `ClearingHouse_PositionChanged` events from Gnosis and Optimism chains containing trader addresses and fee amounts
- **Liquidation events**: Parsed Perpetual Protocol `ClearingHouse_PositionLiquidated` events from Gnosis and Optimism chains containing liquidation fee amounts and affected trader addresses  
- **External data**: End-of-day token price feeds for USD conversion of native fee tokens (xDAI on Gnosis, USDC on Optimism)
- **Token metadata**: Market address mappings to token symbols for categorization and labeling
- **Protocol metadata**: Hardcoded token addresses for xDAI (Gnosis) and USDC (Optimism) fee tokens

## 3. Step-by-step calculation

### Component A: Daily active user calculation
- **Purpose**: Counts distinct users who performed trading activities each day across both protocol versions
- **Logic**: Extracts trader addresses from `ClearingHouse_PositionChanged` events on both Gnosis (v1) and Optimism (v2) chains. Events are filtered to the `trader` field which represents the account opening, closing, or modifying perpetual positions. User addresses are deduplicated using HyperLogLog sketching to handle users active across multiple chains or transactions within the same day. The data is aggregated by day with various dimensional breakdowns including project-wide totals, per-chain counts, and per-user-type counts.
- **Key fields**: `trader` addresses from position change events, `block_timestamp` for daily grouping, `chain` for multi-chain aggregation

### Component B: Fee collection calculation  
- **Purpose**: Calculates total daily fee revenue from both trading activities and liquidations
- **Logic**: Combines two fee sources - trading fees from `ClearingHouse_PositionChanged` events using the `fee` field, and liquidation fees from `ClearingHouse_PositionLiquidated` events using the `liquidationFee` field. Fee amounts are extracted from both Gnosis (v1) and Optimism (v2) deployments. Raw fee values are normalized by dividing by 10^18 to correct for token decimals. The fees are then converted to USD using end-of-day price feeds for the respective fee tokens (xDAI on Gnosis, USDC on Optimism). Market addresses are mapped to token symbols using a predefined lookup table for categorization. All fees are aggregated daily across chains and fee types.
- **Key fields**: `fee` amounts from trading events, `liquidationFee` amounts from liquidation events, `token_address` for price conversion, `market_address` for categorization

### Final aggregation
- **Combining components**: The daily active users and daily fees are joined by date to create user-fee pairs for the same time periods
- **Currency conversion**: All fees are converted to USD using end-of-day token price feeds, with xDAI prices used for Gnosis chain fees and USDC prices (typically 1.0) for Optimism chain fees
- **Time aggregation**: Both components use daily time boundaries created by truncating `block_timestamp` to day granularity, ensuring consistent time alignment between users and fees
- **Final calculation**: The average fees per user is computed by dividing the total daily fee amount (in USD) by the total daily active user count, using the standard ARPU (Average Revenue Per User) calculation methodology. Days with zero users result in null AFPU values, while days with zero fees but active users result in zero AFPU values. Missing dates in the time series are filled with zero values to maintain continuity.

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

Perpetual ProtocolPERP

Average fees per user (AFPU)

Average fees per user (AFPU)

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