Validators process transactions and receive fees from users (supply-side fees).

Stellar is a distributed ledger for transfer and store of value (a blockchain). Stellar was founded by Jed McCaleb launched in 2014.

XLM holders own and govern the protocol. They currently take all of the total transaction fees paid by users (revenue).

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Blockchains (L1)

Stellar

# Stellar Average fees per user (AFPU) Methodology

## 1. Overview

AFPU (Average Fees Per User) measures the average amount of fees paid per daily active user on the Stellar network. This metric is calculated by dividing the total daily fees collected by the network by the number of unique daily active users. It provides insight into the average value generated per user and helps assess user engagement and network monetization efficiency.

## 2. Data sources

The AFPU calculation relies on two primary data sources:

- **Stellar transaction records**: Complete transaction data from the Stellar blockchain including transaction metadata, fees, and participant addresses
- **End-of-day XLM price feeds**: Daily closing price data for XLM tokens used to convert native fees to USD values

## 3. Step-by-step calculation

### Component A: Daily active users calculation
- **Purpose**: Identifies and counts unique users who initiated transactions on each day
- **Logic**: Extracts the `source_account` field from all Stellar transaction records, filtering for successful transactions only. Groups transactions by day and identifies distinct user addresses using HyperLogLog aggregation for efficient distinct counting. Users are defined as transaction senders (accounts that initiated transactions)
- **Key fields**: `source_account` (user address), `block_timestamp` (for daily grouping), `successful` (transaction status filter)

### Component B: Daily fees calculation  
- **Purpose**: Calculates the total fees collected by the Stellar network each day in USD
- **Logic**: Extracts the `fee_charged` field from successful Stellar transactions, which represents fees paid in stroops (Stellar's smallest unit). Converts stroops to XLM by dividing by 10,000,000. Aggregates all transaction fees by day to get total daily fees in XLM. Converts the native XLM fees to USD using end-of-day price feeds
- **Key fields**: `fee_charged` (transaction fee in stroops), `successful` (transaction status), `block_timestamp` (for daily aggregation)

### Final aggregation
- **Combining components**: The daily fees (in USD) and daily active user counts are calculated independently and then combined for the final division
- **Currency conversion**: Native XLM fees are converted to USD using end-of-day XLM price feeds applied to the daily aggregated fee amounts
- **Time aggregation**: Both fees and users are aggregated using daily boundaries based on transaction timestamps truncated to day level
- **Final calculation**: AFPU is calculated by dividing the total daily fees in USD by the count of distinct daily active users, producing an average fee amount per user in USD for each day. Missing days are filled with zero values to ensure complete time series data

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

StellarXLM

Average fees per user (AFPU)

Average fees per user (AFPU)

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