Overcollateralized borrowers deposit funds into Synthetix and mint synthetic assets.

Synthetix is a non-custodial derivatives exchange protocol built on Ethereum. Synthetix was founded by Kain Warwick and launched in 2017.

SNX tokenholders own and govern the protocol. They currently take all of the total trading fees paid by traders (revenue). Synthetix's investors include Paradigm, Framework Ventures, Coinbase Ventures, etc.

governance

github

twitter

discord

etherscan

website

Derivative exchanges

Synthetix

# Synthetix Active users (weekly) Methodology

## 1. Overview

Weekly Active Users (WAU) measures the number of unique addresses that interact with Synthetix protocol within any 7-day rolling period. This metric tracks user engagement across Synthetix's derivatives trading products, including spot synthetic asset exchanges and perpetual futures trading on Ethereum and Optimism. The calculation uses a rolling 7-day window approach built from Daily Active Users (DAU), employing HyperLogLog sketches for efficient distinct user counting across multiple dimensional breakdowns.

## 2. Data sources

The calculation relies on parsed blockchain events from Synthetix protocol contracts across two networks:

- **Ethereum events**: Parsed `SynthExchange` and `AtomicSynthExchange` events from Synthetix v1 contracts capturing spot trading activity
- **Optimism events**: Parsed `SynthExchange` events for spot trading, `PositionModified` events from v1 and v2 perpetual futures contracts for derivatives trading
- **Contract metadata**: `MarketAdded` events from futures market managers used to distinguish between protocol versions
- **Transaction data**: Block timestamps and transaction hashes from Ethereum and Optimism networks for temporal analysis

## 3. Step-by-step calculation

### Component A: User activity identification
- **Purpose**: Identifies all unique user addresses that interact with Synthetix trading functions
- **Logic**: Extracts user addresses from various trading event types across Ethereum and Optimism. On Ethereum, captures addresses from spot trading via `SynthExchange` and `AtomicSynthExchange` events, categorizing users as "Ethereum Spot Traders". On Optimism, captures both spot traders from `SynthExchange` events and perpetual futures traders from `PositionModified` events. For perpetual futures v2, applies a denylist filter to exclude v1 contract addresses, ensuring users are only counted in their most recent protocol version
- **Key fields**: User addresses from `account` parameters, block timestamps for temporal analysis, contract addresses for protocol version identification, user type classifications based on trading activity

### Component B: Daily active user aggregation  
- **Purpose**: Converts raw user activity into daily distinct user counts with efficient storage using HyperLogLog
- **Logic**: Groups all user activity by daily timestamp boundaries, chain, user type, and product dimensions. Creates HyperLogLog sketches for each unique user address within each daily group, enabling scalable distinct counting. Applies chain availability filtering to ensure only supported network data is included
- **Key fields**: Daily timestamp boundaries via `timestamp_trunc`, dimension fields including `chain`, `user_type`, `product_id`, HyperLogLog initialization of user addresses as `user_dau`

### Component C: Rolling window construction
- **Purpose**: Creates 7-day rolling windows for WAU calculation without gaps in the time series
- **Logic**: Generates a continuous date spine covering the full historical range to prevent missing days from skipping WAU calculations. For each target date, creates joins to the previous 6 days plus the current day (7 total days). Joins this 7-day window with the daily HLL user data to collect all relevant user sketches for each rolling period
- **Key fields**: Date spine timestamps, 7-day window arrays via `generate_timestamp_array`, joined daily user data with HLL sketches

### Component D: Dimensional breakdowns
- **Purpose**: Calculates WAU across four different analytical dimensions
- **Logic**: Aggregates the 7-day rolling windows across multiple dimension levels. Creates separate calculations for overall project level (all dimensions combined), by chain (Ethereum vs Optimism), by user type (spot traders vs futures traders), and by product (for future product segmentation). Each breakdown merges HyperLogLog sketches across the relevant dimension and extracts the final distinct count
- **Key fields**: Dimension identifiers (`project_dbt_tag`, `chain`, `user_type`, `product_id`), merged HLL sketches, extracted distinct counts as `user_wau`

### Final aggregation
- **Combining components**: Unions all dimensional breakdowns into a single output table with dimension indicators and null values for non-applicable dimension fields
- **Currency conversion**: Not applicable for user count metrics
- **Time aggregation**: Uses daily timestamp boundaries with 7-day rolling windows, maintaining daily granularity in output
- **Final calculation**: Extracts distinct user counts from merged HyperLogLog sketches representing unique addresses active within each 7-day rolling period, broken down by project, chain, user type, and product dimensions

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

Unique revenue-generating users over a rolling 7-day window.

SynthetixSNX

Active users (weekly)

Active users (weekly)

Competitive landscape

Chain breakdown