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 Token incentives Methodology

## 1. Overview

Token incentives for Stellar measures the total amount of XLM tokens distributed daily through the network's historical inflation mechanism. This metric captures the token rewards that were distributed to network participants through Stellar's inflation operations, which were discontinued around 2020. The calculation tracks these distributions and converts them to USD to provide a standardized measure of token-based incentives paid out by the network.

## 2. Data sources

- **Stellar operations data**: Blockchain operation records containing inflation operation types that triggered token distributions
- **Stellar effects data**: Account effect records showing account credit events when XLM tokens were actually distributed to accounts
- **External price data**: End-of-day CoinGecko price feeds for XLM to USD conversion

## 3. Step-by-step calculation

### Component A: Inflation operations identification
- **Purpose**: Identifies when inflation operations occurred on the Stellar network
- **Logic**: Filters Stellar operations data to find records where the `operation_type` equals 'inflation'. These operations represent the network's mechanism for distributing newly minted tokens as rewards. The data includes `block_number`, `block_timestamp`, and `operation_type` fields to track when and where these operations occurred.
- **Key fields**: `block_number` for linking to effects, `block_timestamp` for timing, `operation_type` filtered to 'inflation'

### Component B: Account credit effects identification  
- **Purpose**: Identifies the actual token distributions that resulted from inflation operations
- **Logic**: Filters Stellar effects data to find account credit events where `effect_type` equals 'account_credited' and `asset_type` equals 'native' (indicating XLM tokens). These records show the actual token amounts credited to accounts as a result of inflation operations. The data includes recipient account information and the credited amount.
- **Key fields**: `block_number` for joining with operations, `account` for recipient tracking, `amount` for token quantities, `effect_type` and `asset_type` for filtering

### Component C: Linking operations to distributions
- **Purpose**: Connects inflation operations with their corresponding token distributions
- **Logic**: Joins the filtered operations data with the filtered effects data using `block_number` as the key. This ensures that each account credit is properly attributed to the inflation operation that caused it. The join produces records showing both when an inflation operation occurred and how much was distributed to each account.
- **Key fields**: `block_number` as join key, `block_timestamp` for timing, `account` and `amount` for distribution details

### Component D: Daily aggregation
- **Purpose**: Calculates total daily token incentives distributed
- **Logic**: Groups the linked operation-effect records by day using timestamp truncation to daily boundaries, then sums all `amount` values for each day. This produces one record per day showing the total XLM tokens distributed through inflation rewards on that date.
- **Key fields**: Truncated daily timestamp, summed `amount` as `total_token_incentives`

### Final aggregation
- **Combining components**: The daily aggregated amounts represent the complete token incentive calculation, with each day's total capturing all inflation-based token distributions
- **Currency conversion**: USD conversion is applied using CoinGecko end-of-day price feeds for XLM, converting the native token amounts to dollar values
- **Time aggregation**: Data is aggregated to daily boundaries using timestamp truncation, ensuring consistent daily reporting periods
- **Final calculation**: The final metric value represents the total USD value of XLM tokens distributed daily through Stellar's inflation mechanism, providing a measure of network token incentives paid to participants

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

Value of native tokens distributed as incentives.

StellarXLM

Token incentives

Token incentives

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