Stacks miners batch users' transactions and receive fees from users (supply-side fees). Miners submit transactions to Bitcoin, paying a share of the transaction fees to Bitcoin miners.

Stacks is an smart contract platform for creating decentralized applications on Bitcoin (a blockchain). Stacks was founded by Muneeb Ali and Ryan Shea, and launched in 2021.

STX tokenholders own and govern the protocol. They currently do not take a cut of the total transaction fees paid by users (revenue). Stacks' investors include IOSG Ventures, The Spartan Group, Hashkey Exchange, etc.

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Stacks

# Stacks Expenses Methodology

## 1. Overview

Stacks expenses represents the total USD value of token incentives (coinbase STX mints) distributed as block rewards each day. This metric measures the daily cost incurred by the Stacks network to incentivize miners through the Proof of Transfer (PoX) consensus mechanism, where miners spend BTC to earn STX coinbase rewards. Expenses consist entirely of token incentives, as there are no other protocol-level expense categories. The calculation takes the coinbase reward amount from each Stacks block, converts it to USD using daily STX prices, and aggregates to daily totals.

## 2. Data sources

- **Stacks blockchain transaction data**: Coinbase transaction records containing minted STX amounts, block timestamps, and transaction types
- **CoinGecko price data**: Daily STX/USD price feeds using the CoinGecko identifier `blockstack`

## 3. Step-by-step calculation

### Component A: Stacks coinbase processing
- **Purpose**: Extract and process coinbase reward data from Stacks blocks
- **Logic**: Retrieve coinbase transactions from Stacks blockchain data, extracting block timestamps and reward amounts. Convert coinbase reward amounts from micro-STX to STX by dividing by 10^6. The current reward rate is 475 STX per block, distributed to the SIP-031 reward pool.
- **Key fields**: `block_timestamp`, `block_number`, coinbase reward amount (converted to STX)

### Component B: STX price aggregation
- **Purpose**: Provide daily STX/USD pricing data
- **Logic**: STX prices are sourced from CoinGecko using the `blockstack` identifier and aggregated to daily level. Daily prices provide consistent exchange rates for converting STX rewards to USD values.
- **Key fields**: `timestamp` (daily), `price` (USD per STX)

### Component C: Token incentives calculation
- **Purpose**: Calculate the daily USD value of coinbase rewards
- **Logic**: Join the processed coinbase data with daily price data by matching the block timestamp (truncated to day) with the price timestamp. Multiply the coinbase reward amount (in STX) by the daily price (in USD) to get the USD value of each block's reward. Sum these USD values by day to get total daily token incentives. Include metadata fields: `market_sector_id` as 'blockchains_l2', `business_segment_id` as 'blockchain', and `chain_id` as 'stacks'.
- **Key fields**: `timestamp` (daily), `token_incentives` (USD value)

### Final aggregation
- **Combining components**: The expenses metric directly uses the `token_incentives` value from the token incentives calculation, renaming it as `expenses`
- **Currency conversion**: Coinbase rewards are converted from micro-STX to STX, then multiplied by daily STX/USD prices to get USD values
- **Time aggregation**: All data is aggregated to daily boundaries using timestamp truncation to day level
- **Final calculation**: The final expenses value represents the sum of all coinbase reward payments (in USD) for each day, providing a measure of the daily cost the Stacks network pays to miners for security

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

Total project operating and incentive expenses.

StacksSTX

Expenses

Expenses

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