Liquidity providers deposit funds into PoolTogether and receive a return on investment in lottery winnings (supply-side fees).

PoolTogether is an asset management (no-loss lottery) protocol built on Ethereum and other adjacent blockchains. PoolTogether was founded by Leighton Cusack and launched in 2019.

POOL tokenholders own and govern the protocol. They currently do not take a cut of the total return on investment paid by liquidity providers (revenue). PoolTogether’s investors include IDEO CoLab Ventures, DTC Capital, ConsenSys Ventures, etc.

governance

github

twitter

discord

etherscan

website

Asset management

PoolTogether

# PoolTogether Expenses Methodology

## 1. Overview

PoolTogether expenses represent the total USD value of token incentives distributed to users across all supported chains. This metric captures the cost of user acquisition and retention through token rewards, treating distributed incentives as operational expenses. The calculation aggregates daily incentive claims from multiple reward distribution contracts across Ethereum, Polygon, and Optimism networks.

## 2. Data sources

- **Blockchain events**: Parsed incentive claim events from PoolTogether reward distribution contracts across multiple chains
  - Ethereum `TokenFaucetV2` and `TokenFaucet` `Claimed` events for POOL token distributions
  - Polygon `TokenFaucet` `Claimed` events for POOL token distributions  
  - Optimism `TwabRewards` `RewardsClaimed` events for OP token distributions
- **External data**: End-of-day token price feeds for USD conversion
- **Token metadata**: Token decimal information for amount normalization

## 3. Step-by-step calculation

### Component A: Incentive claim extraction
- **Purpose**: Extracts raw token incentive claims from blockchain events across multiple chains
- **Logic**: Processes parsed events from different reward distribution contracts, extracting the claiming user address, token contract address, raw token amount, and timestamp. Each event represents a user claiming token rewards from PoolTogether's incentive programs. The system handles multiple contract types including token faucets on Ethereum and Polygon, and time-weighted average balance rewards on Optimism
- **Key fields**: `block_timestamp` for timing, `address` for claiming account, `amount_column` (varies by contract: `newTokens` for faucets, `amount` for rewards), and hardcoded token addresses for each chain

### Component B: Daily aggregation and classification  
- **Purpose**: Aggregates claims to daily totals and applies business classification
- **Logic**: Groups incentive claims by day, chain, claiming address, and token type. Applies consistent business classification marking all incentives as "Asset management" business line with "yield_aggregator" segment. Preserves individual account-level detail while creating daily time boundaries
- **Key fields**: `timestamp` truncated to daily grain, `chain_id` for blockchain identification, `token_incentives` for aggregated amounts, and business classification fields

### Component C: USD conversion and decimal correction
- **Purpose**: Converts raw token amounts to standardized USD values
- **Logic**: Applies decimal correction using token metadata to convert raw blockchain amounts to human-readable token quantities, then converts to USD using end-of-day price feeds. This handles the different decimal places used by various tokens (18 decimals for POOL and OP tokens)
- **Key fields**: Corrected `token_incentives` amounts converted from raw blockchain integers to decimal-adjusted USD values

### Final aggregation
- **Combining components**: Daily incentive amounts are processed through the token incentives pipeline, then simply renamed from `token_incentives` to `expenses` to reflect their treatment as operational costs
- **Currency conversion**: All amounts converted to USD using end-of-day token prices matched by date and token address
- **Time aggregation**: Data aggregated to daily boundaries using timestamp truncation, with gap filling applied to ensure continuous time series
- **Final calculation**: The final expenses value equals the sum of all USD-converted token incentives distributed on each day, representing PoolTogether's cost of incentivizing user participation across all supported chains and reward programs

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

Total project operating and incentive expenses.

PoolTogetherPOOL

Expenses

Expenses

Competitive landscape

Chain breakdown