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 Expenses Methodology

## 1. Overview

The Stellar expenses metric measures the daily USD value of token incentives distributed through Stellar's historical inflation mechanism. This metric captures the network's operational costs by tracking XLM tokens that were automatically distributed to accounts as inflation rewards. The calculation aggregates these inflation payments daily and converts them to USD, representing the network's expenses for maintaining operations through token distribution. This mechanism was discontinued around 2020, so the metric primarily captures historical data.

## 2. Data sources

- **Stellar blockchain operations**: Records of all blockchain operations including inflation operations that triggered automatic token distribution
- **Stellar blockchain effects**: Account state changes and token movements resulting from blockchain operations, specifically account credit events
- **End-of-day price feeds**: CoinGecko price data for XLM token to enable USD conversion of native token amounts

## 3. Step-by-step calculation

### Component A: Inflation operations extraction
- **Purpose**: Identifies all inflation operations that triggered automatic XLM distribution
- **Logic**: Filters Stellar blockchain operations to include only records where `operation_type` equals `inflation`. These operations represent the network's automatic inflation mechanism that distributed new XLM tokens to accounts based on predefined rules.
- **Key fields**: `block_number` and `block_timestamp` for linking to corresponding token distributions, `operation_type` for filtering inflation events

### Component B: Token distribution effects
- **Purpose**: Captures the actual XLM token credits resulting from inflation operations
- **Logic**: Filters Stellar blockchain effects to include only account credit events where `effect_type` equals `account_credited` and `asset_type` equals `native` (representing XLM). These effects show the actual token amounts distributed to accounts.
- **Key fields**: `block_number` for linking to operations, `account` receiving the credits, `amount` of XLM distributed, `asset_type` confirming native XLM

### Component C: Operations and effects matching
- **Purpose**: Links inflation operations with their corresponding token distribution amounts
- **Logic**: Joins inflation operations with account credit effects using matching `block_number` values. This connection establishes which token distributions resulted from each inflation operation. Amounts are safely cast to bignumeric for precise calculation.
- **Key fields**: `block_number` as the join key, `amount` representing XLM distributed per account, `block_timestamp` for daily aggregation

### Component D: Daily aggregation
- **Purpose**: Sums all inflation-distributed XLM amounts per day
- **Logic**: Groups matched operations and effects by daily timestamp boundaries using timestamp truncation to day level. Sums all `amount` values within each day to calculate total daily XLM distribution from inflation.
- **Key fields**: `daily_timestamp` for grouping, `total_token_incentives` as the sum of all daily inflation rewards

### Final aggregation
- **Combining components**: The daily XLM totals from inflation operations represent the raw expenses data
- **Currency conversion**: Daily XLM amounts are converted to USD using end-of-day CoinGecko price feeds for the XLM token, applying the `convert_to_usd_and_correct_decimals` methodology
- **Time aggregation**: Data is aggregated at daily boundaries with timestamps truncated to day level
- **Final calculation**: The USD-converted daily token incentive amounts are renamed as `expenses` since these inflation payments represent the network's operational costs for maintaining and incentivizing the ecosystem. The metric applies zero-fill strategy for any gaps in the time series to ensure complete daily coverage.

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

Total project operating and incentive expenses.

StellarXLM

Expenses

Expenses

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