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 revenue per user (ARPU) Methodology

## 1. Overview

Average Revenue Per User (ARPU) measures the average daily revenue generated per active user on Perpetual Protocol. This metric is calculated by dividing total daily revenue by the number of daily active users (DAU). It provides insight into the monetization efficiency of the protocol by showing how much revenue each user generates on average per day. The calculation covers both Perpetual Protocol v1 on Gnosis chain and v2 on Optimism chain, accounting for different fee structures and revenue splits across versions and time periods.

## 2. Data sources

The ARPU calculation relies on several key data sources:

- **Trading events**: Parsed `PositionChanged` events from Perpetual Protocol v1 smart contracts on Gnosis chain and v2 smart contracts on Optimism chain, containing fee amounts and trader addresses
- **Liquidation events**: Parsed `PositionLiquidated` events from both protocol versions, containing liquidation fee amounts and trader addresses  
- **End-of-day token price feeds**: USD price data for xDAI (Gnosis chain) and USDC (Optimism chain) tokens used for fee payments
- **Market metadata**: Static mapping of market contract addresses to token symbols for proper categorization
- **Revenue percentage configuration**: Time-based configuration defining what percentage of fees constitute protocol revenue versus liquidity provider rewards

## 3. Step-by-step calculation

### Component A: Trading fee extraction
- **Purpose**: Extract trading fees paid by users when opening, closing, or modifying perpetual positions
- **Logic**: Parse `PositionChanged` events from both Perpetual Protocol v1 contracts on Gnosis chain and v2 contracts on Optimism chain. Extract the `fee` field which represents trading fees paid. Aggregate fees by day, account address, and market. Convert fee amounts from wei to standard units by dividing by 10^18. Join with market metadata to obtain token symbols for proper categorization.
- **Key fields**: `fee` (trading fee amount), `trader` (user address), `amm` or `baseToken` (market identifier), `block_timestamp` (transaction timing)

### Component B: Liquidation fee extraction  
- **Purpose**: Extract liquidation fees generated when positions are liquidated due to insufficient collateral
- **Logic**: Parse `PositionLiquidated` events from both protocol versions. Extract the `liquidationFee` field representing fees generated from liquidations. Unlike trading fees, liquidation fees do not contribute to protocol revenue and are excluded from the revenue calculation. Aggregate by day and convert amounts from wei to standard units.
- **Key fields**: `liquidationFee` (liquidation fee amount), `trader` (liquidated user address), `amm` or `baseToken` (market identifier)

### Component C: Revenue calculation with version-specific splits
- **Purpose**: Calculate protocol revenue by applying appropriate percentage splits based on protocol version and time period
- **Logic**: Apply different revenue percentage calculations depending on protocol version and date. For v1 trading fees, 100% counts as protocol revenue. For v2 trading fees, apply time-based percentage splits - 10% of fees from November 25, 2021 through June 21, 2022, then 20% of fees starting June 22, 2022. Liquidation fees from both versions contribute 0% to protocol revenue. Join fee data with revenue percentage configuration table based on timestamp to apply correct splits.
- **Key fields**: `fees` (total fee amount), `version` (v1 or v2), `component` (Trading or Liquidation), `revenue_percentage` (time-based percentage split)

### Component D: Daily active user calculation
- **Purpose**: Count unique daily users who performed trading activities 
- **Logic**: Extract trader addresses from `PositionChanged` events across both protocol versions and chains. Aggregate unique addresses per day using HyperLogLog algorithm for efficient distinct counting. This includes users who opened new positions, closed existing positions, or modified position sizes. Users are deduplicated across multiple transactions within the same day.
- **Key fields**: `trader` (user address), `block_timestamp` (transaction timing), `user_type` (categorized as "Trader")

### Final aggregation
- **Combining components**: Sum all protocol revenue amounts by day across both chains and protocol versions. Count total unique daily active users across both chains. Revenue includes only trading fees with appropriate version-specific percentage splits applied, while liquidation fees are excluded.
- **Currency conversion**: Convert all fee amounts to USD using end-of-day token price feeds for xDAI (Gnosis chain) and USDC (Optimism chain). Apply conversion at the individual transaction level before aggregation.
- **Time aggregation**: Aggregate all data to daily boundaries using timestamp truncation to day level. Apply chain availability filters to ensure data quality.
- **Final calculation**: Calculate daily ARPU by dividing total daily protocol revenue (in USD) by total daily active users. Apply zero-filling strategy for days with missing data to maintain continuous time series. The final formula is: ARPU = Total Daily Revenue (USD) / Daily Active Users

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

Perpetual ProtocolPERP

Average revenue per user (ARPU)

Average revenue per user (ARPU)

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