Liquidity providers deposit funds into Sushiswap and receive trading fees from traders (supply-side fees).

Sushiswap is a non-custodial exchange protocol built on Ethereum (originally a fork of Uniswap). Sushiswap was founded by a pseudonym Chef Nomi and launched in 2020.

SUSHI tokenholders own and govern the protocol. They currently take a cut of the total trading fees paid by traders (revenue).

governance

github

twitter

discord

etherscan

website

Exchanges (DEX)

SushiSwap

# SushiSwap Expenses Methodology

## 1. Overview

SushiSwap's expenses metric measures the total USD value of SUSHI token incentives distributed daily through the protocol's liquidity mining programs. This metric captures the protocol's operational cost of rewarding liquidity providers across multiple chains. The calculation aggregates SUSHI token distributions from farming contracts (MasterChef and MiniChef) across 8 blockchain networks, converts them to USD, and presents them as daily expense totals.

## 2. Data sources

- **Blockchain events**: Parsed `Harvest` events from SushiSwap's MasterChef and MiniChef smart contracts across Ethereum, Polygon, Fantom, Arbitrum, Gnosis, Avalanche, BSC, and Optimism
- **Transaction data**: Ethereum token transfer records from the legacy MasterChef contract
- **External data**: End-of-day SUSHI token price feeds for USD conversion and token metadata for decimal correction
- **Protocol metadata**: SushiSwap contract addresses and liquidity incentive account information across supported chains
- **Data filtering**: Denylist of internal protocol addresses to exclude dummy tokens and internal operations

## 3. Step-by-step calculation

### Component A: Multi-chain harvest events
- **Purpose**: Captures SUSHI token distributions when users claim farming rewards across 8 chains
- **Logic**: Extracts `Harvest` events from MasterChef (Ethereum) and MiniChef contracts (7 other chains). Each event contains the recipient address, SUSHI token address, and distribution amount. Events are filtered by chain and include metadata like block timestamp, transaction hash, and log index for tracking
- **Key fields**: `address` (recipient), `amount` (SUSHI tokens distributed), `block_timestamp`, `transaction_hash`, chain identifier

### Component B: Legacy ethereum distributions
- **Purpose**: Captures SUSHI distributions from the original MasterChef contract on Ethereum through token transfers
- **Logic**: Identifies token transfers where the `from_address` matches the legacy MasterChef contract address and involves SUSHI tokens. Filters out transactions that match addresses in the denylist to exclude internal protocol operations and dummy token movements
- **Key fields**: `from_address` (MasterChef contract), `value` (SUSHI amount), `block_timestamp`, recipient address

### Component C: Transaction filtering and validation
- **Purpose**: Removes internal protocol transactions that don't represent actual incentive expenses
- **Logic**: Applies a denylist of 23 known internal addresses including vesting contracts, dummy tokens, and internal protocol accounts. Excludes any transactions involving these addresses to ensure only legitimate user incentive distributions are counted
- **Key fields**: Transaction hash matching against denylist, address validation

### Component D: USD conversion and decimal correction
- **Purpose**: Standardizes SUSHI token amounts to USD values for consistent expense reporting
- **Logic**: Joins SUSHI token amounts with end-of-day price feeds to get USD values. Applies decimal correction based on SUSHI token's 18-decimal standard. Uses the timestamp of each distribution to match with the appropriate daily price
- **Key fields**: `amount` (raw SUSHI), price from feeds, `token_incentives` (USD value), decimal adjustment factor

### Final aggregation
- **Combining components**: Union all harvest events with legacy token transfers, then join with liquidity incentive account metadata to validate addresses and add contract names
- **Currency conversion**: All SUSHI amounts converted to USD using end-of-day prices matched to distribution date
- **Time aggregation**: Distributions aggregated to daily totals using timestamp truncation to day boundary, grouped by chain
- **Final calculation**: Sum of all daily SUSHI distributions in USD becomes the expenses value, with forward-fill logic applied to ensure continuous daily reporting even when no distributions occur

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

Total project operating and incentive expenses.

SushiSwapSUSHI

Expenses

Expenses

Competitive landscape

Chain breakdown