# Fees Methodology

## Overview

Fees measure the total value users pay to use a project’s application. Some examples include interest paid by borrowers (lending), trading fees paid by traders (DEX), and transaction fees paid by users (L1 & L2 blockchain). This metric shows how much the project is able to generate economic value.

## Data sources

- Smart contract events and program instructions capturing fee-generating activities
- End-of-day price feeds for USD conversion
- Asset metadata and historical yield rates

## Common calculation approaches

### Trading and swap fees
For decentralized exchanges and social trading platforms, swap and trade data is tracked from smart contracts and program instructions. For example, `Swap` events are tracked from Uniswap V3 pools, while trade data is tracked from program instructions on pump.fun.

### Lending and interest fees
For lending protocols, borrower interest and flash loan premiums are tracked from smart contract events. For instance, `Withdraw`, `FlashLoan`, and `LiquidationCall` events are tracked from Aave contracts to determine the total economic value paid by users.

### Network transaction fees
For L1 and L2 blockchains, total transaction fees are tracked from network execution data. On Tron, these fees are comprised of energy and bandwidth resource costs or direct TRX burns.

### Reserve-based yield
For stablecoin issuers, economic value is tracked from the reserve assets backing the issued tokens. For issuers such as Tether, fees are calculated based on historical yield rates and the outstanding supply of assets like Tether USD.

**Note:** The calculation approaches and protocol examples above are representative patterns. Individual protocol implementations may vary.

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

Total value users pay to use a protocol (gross fees, user-paid fees).

Fees

Exchanges (DEX)

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

Thruster is a non-custodial exchange protocol built on Blast. Thruster was launched in 2024.

Thruster team and investors own and govern the protocol. They currently take a cut of the total trading fees paid by traders, and earn native yield (revenue). Thruster's investors include Mirana Ventures, Manifold, OKX Ventures, etc.

Thruster Classic

Archived

Fees

Fees