Creators mint & users sell NFTs on Rarible. Creators and users receive payments from sales & creators receive royalties from secondary sales.

Rarible is a non-custodial NFT marketplace protocol built on Ethereum. Rarible was founded by Alexander Salnikov and launched in 2020.

RARI tokenholders own and govern the protocol. They currently take all of the total transaction fees paid by traders (revenue). Rarible's investors include Coinbase Ventures, CoinFund, ParaFi Capital, etc.

governance

github

twitter

discord

etherscan

website

NFT marketplaces

Rarible

# Rarible Earnings Methodology

## 1. Overview

Rarible earnings represents the protocol's net income calculated as trading fee revenue minus token incentive expenses. This metric answers the question "How much profit does Rarible generate from its NFT marketplace operations after accounting for token-based user incentives?" The calculation aggregates fee revenue from multiple exchange contract versions across Ethereum and Polygon, then subtracts RARI token distributions used to incentivize platform usage.

## 2. Data sources

The earnings calculation uses several categories of blockchain data:

- **Ethereum function call traces**: Trading functions from ExchangeV1, ExchangeV12, and ExchangeV2 contracts including `exchange`, `directPurchase`, `directAcceptBid`, and `matchOrders` functions
- **Polygon function call traces**: Trading functions from ExchangeMeta contracts including `directPurchase`, `directAcceptBid`, and `matchOrders` functions  
- **Ethereum event logs**: `Buy` events from ERC721Sale, ERC1155Sale, and TokenSale contracts, plus `Claim` events from RariMineV2 contracts
- **Ethereum function call traces for incentives**: `claim` function calls from RariMineV3 contracts
- **Royalty registry data**: `getRoyalties` function calls from RoyaltyRegistry (Ethereum) and RoyaltiesRegistry (Polygon) contracts
- **End-of-day token price feeds**: For USD conversion of fee amounts and incentive distributions
- **Token metadata**: For decimal correction and address validation

## 3. Step-by-step calculation

### Component A: Exchange v1 trading fees
- **Purpose**: Calculate fee revenue from the original Rarible exchange contracts
- **Logic**: Extract trading data from ExchangeV1 and ExchangeV12 `exchange` function calls on Ethereum. Identify the payment token by checking if `buyAsset.tokenId` equals zero - if so, use the buy asset token, otherwise use the sell asset token. Calculate fee tiers by combining `buyerFee` and `sellerFee` parameters divided by 10,000. For amount calculation, if the order involves fungible tokens (tokenId = 0), multiply the price ratio by the trade amount; otherwise use the amount directly. Handle native ETH trades by replacing null addresses with the WETH contract address. Adjust final amounts by adding half the fee when no direct ETH value is recorded in the transaction.
- **Key fields**: `buyerFee`, `sellerFee` for fee calculations, `buyAsset` and `sellAsset` for token identification, `buying`, `selling`, and `amount` for trade values

### Component B: Exchange v2 direct trading fees  
- **Purpose**: Calculate fee revenue from Exchange v2 direct purchase and bid acceptance functions
- **Logic**: Process `directPurchase` and `directAcceptBid` function calls from ExchangeV2 (Ethereum) and ExchangeMeta (Polygon) contracts. Extract fee tiers by taking the last 5 characters from both `sellOrderData` and `buyOrderData` (or `bidData` for bids), converting from hex to integers, summing them, and dividing by 10,000. For purchases, use the `buyOrderPaymentAmount` as the base amount and the transaction value as total amount. For bids, use the lesser of `bidPaymentAmount` and `sellOrderPaymentAmount` as base amount, with zero total amount. Replace null payment token addresses with the appropriate wrapped native token address for each chain. Join with royalty registry data based on matching transaction hash and trace address to calculate royalty amounts.
- **Key fields**: `sellOrderData`, `buyOrderData`, `bidData` for fee tiers, `paymentToken` for token identification, `buyOrderPaymentAmount`, `bidPaymentAmount` for amounts

### Component C: Exchange v2 matched order fees
- **Purpose**: Calculate fee revenue from Exchange v2 order matching functions
- **Logic**: Process `matchOrders` function calls from ExchangeV2 and ExchangeMeta contracts. Extract fee tiers by combining the last 5 characters of `orderLeft.Data` and `orderRight.Data`. Identify payment tokens by extracting addresses from bytes 27-46 of the asset type data in either make or take assets, checking against known token lists, and defaulting to wrapped native tokens for null addresses. Calculate trade amounts by taking the lesser value between opposite direction assets (left take vs right make, or left make vs right take) depending on which side represents the payment token. Apply similar royalty lookups as direct trades. For final amounts, use transaction value when available, otherwise add half the fee amount to the base trade amount.
- **Key fields**: `orderLeft.Data`, `orderRight.Data` for fees, `makeAsset`, `takeAsset` for token and amount identification

### Component D: Legacy token sale fees
- **Purpose**: Calculate fee revenue from earlier Rarible token sale contracts
- **Logic**: Collect `Buy` events from ERC721Sale, ERC1155Sale, and TokenSale contracts on Ethereum, plus `buy` function calls from ERC721Sale and ERC1155Sale v2 contracts. For ERC1155 trades, multiply the unit price by the quantity purchased. Use WETH as the payment token for all legacy sales. For v2 function calls, calculate fees using the `sellerFee` parameter divided by 10,000 and multiply by the price amount. Handle ERC1155 v2 sales by multiplying the fee calculation by the buying amount and then by 2.
- **Key fields**: `price` for trade amounts, `value` for ERC1155 quantities, `sellerFee` for v2 fee calculations, `buying` for ERC1155 v2 quantities

### Component E: Token incentive expenses
- **Purpose**: Calculate expenses from RARI token distributions to users
- **Logic**: Collect RARI token distributions from two sources: `Claim` events from RariMineV2 contracts and `claim` function calls from RariMineV3 contracts, both on Ethereum. Use the hardcoded RARI token contract address for all incentive records. For v2 claims, use the `value` parameter directly. For v3 claims, extract the amount from the `_balance.value` field in the function parameters.
- **Key fields**: `value` for v2 claims, `_balance.value` for v3 claims

### Component F: Daily revenue aggregation
- **Purpose**: Aggregate all fee revenue sources into daily totals
- **Logic**: Combine fee amounts from all exchange versions and token sales, truncate timestamps to day boundaries, and sum revenue by day, chain, and token address. Apply USD conversion using end-of-day price feeds and correct for token decimals based on metadata. Group by timestamp, chain, product identifier, and token to create daily revenue totals.
- **Key fields**: `fee_amount` from all trading sources, aggregated as `revenue`

### Component G: Daily expense aggregation  
- **Purpose**: Aggregate token incentive distributions into daily totals
- **Logic**: Take token incentive amounts from both mining contract versions, truncate timestamps to day boundaries, and sum by day and token. Apply USD conversion and decimal correction similar to revenue. Group by timestamp, chain, and product to create daily expense totals.
- **Key fields**: `amount` from incentive sources, aggregated as `token_incentives` then `expenses`

### Final aggregation
- **Combining components**: The final earnings calculation uses the `calculate_earnings` macro which subtracts daily expense totals from daily revenue totals for matching date and identifier combinations
- **Currency conversion**: All amounts are converted to USD using end-of-day price feeds with proper decimal adjustment based on token metadata before the earnings subtraction
- **Time aggregation**: All data is aggregated to daily boundaries using timestamp truncation to day level
- **Final calculation**: Daily earnings equals daily fee revenue minus daily token incentive expenses, with the result finalized using gap-filling logic that ensures continuous daily values using a "fill zeros" strategy for missing data points

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

Net profit (also profits, net income, profitability) — revenue remaining after subtracting expenses.

RaribleRARI

Earnings

Earnings

Competitive landscape