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Unichain

# Unichain Expenses Methodology

## 1. Overview

Unichain expenses represent the total operational costs incurred by the Unichain protocol, combining both cost of revenue and token incentives. This metric answers the question: "What are the total expenses required to operate and incentivize the Unichain ecosystem?" The calculation adds together the protocol's cost of revenue (currently equal to gas fees since Unichain fees go to the sequencer) and token incentive distributions from various campaigns.

## 2. Data sources

The calculation uses the following raw data sources:
- **Unichain transaction records**: Complete transaction data including gas usage metrics, gas prices, L1 gas costs, and fee scalar values
- **Ethereum blockchain events**: Parsed `CampaignCreated` events from Angle V1's Merkl Router Oracle contract containing token incentive campaign information
- **End-of-day token price feeds**: Daily USD price data for converting both ETH gas fees and various token incentives to USD values

## 3. Step-by-step calculation

### Component A: Cost of revenue calculation
- **Purpose**: Calculate the operational costs associated with running the Unichain network
- **Logic**: Extract transaction-level data from Unichain transaction records, including `gas_used`, `gas_price`, `l1_gas_used`, `l1_gas_price`, and `l1_fee_scalar` fields. Calculate L2 gas fees using the formula: gas_used × gas_price ÷ 1e18. Calculate L1 gas fees using the formula: (l1_gas_used × l1_gas_price × l1_fee_scalar) ÷ 1e18. Sum L1 and L2 components to get total transaction fees. Aggregate daily by truncating timestamps to day boundaries. Convert fee amounts from ETH to USD using end-of-day price feeds. Since Unichain hasn't launched UVN yet, all fees go to the sequencer hosted by Uniswap Labs, making fees equivalent to cost of revenue
- **Key fields**: `block_timestamp` for daily aggregation, `gas_used` and `gas_price` for L2 costs, `l1_gas_used`, `l1_gas_price`, and `l1_fee_scalar` for L1 costs

### Component B: Token incentives calculation  
- **Purpose**: Calculate the daily distribution of token incentives from various campaign programs
- **Logic**: Process `CampaignCreated` events from Ethereum blockchain to extract campaign details including `rewardToken` address, `amount` (total incentive amount), `startTimestamp`, and `duration`. Calculate daily distribution rate by dividing total campaign amount by duration in days. Generate a complete date series for each campaign period using the start date and duration. For each day, sum incentive amounts from all active campaigns to get total daily incentive distribution. Convert token amounts to USD using end-of-day price feeds with decimal correction applied. Aggregate by day and chain
- **Key fields**: `amount` (total campaign incentives), `duration` (campaign length), `startTimestamp` and calculated end date for date series generation, `rewardToken` for token identification

### Final aggregation
- **Combining components**: Union the daily cost of revenue amounts and daily token incentive amounts into a single expenses dataset, maintaining separate records for each component type
- **Currency conversion**: All amounts are converted to USD using end-of-day price feeds, with appropriate decimal corrections applied based on token specifications  
- **Time aggregation**: Daily boundaries are established by truncating timestamps to day precision, ensuring consistent temporal alignment across both expense components
- **Final calculation**: The total expenses value represents the sum of cost of revenue and token incentives for each day, with gap-filling applied using a 'fill_zeros' strategy to ensure continuous time series data

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

Total project operating and incentive expenses.

UnichainUNI

Expenses

Expenses

Competitive landscape

Chain breakdown