Liquidity providers deposit funds into Vertex and earn the spread between maker and taker orders.

Vertex is a non-custodial exchange built on Arbitrum that offers spot, perpetuals, and money markets with universal cross-margin accounts. Vertex launched in 2023, and was founded by Darius Tabatabai and Alwin Peng.

The Vertex team own and govern the protocol. They currently take a cut of the total trading fees paid by traders (revenue). Vertex's investors include Wintermute, Hack VC, Jane Street, etc.

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Vertex

# Vertex Average fees per user (AFPU) Methodology

## 1. Overview

Average Fees Per User (AFPU) for Vertex Protocol measures the average trading fees generated per daily active user. This metric provides insight into user monetization efficiency by dividing total daily trading fees by the number of unique daily active traders. The calculation uses data from Vertex Protocol's derivatives trading platform across multiple blockchain networks.

## 2. Data sources

- **Blockchain event logs**: Parsed `FillOrder` events from Vertex Protocol's offchain exchange contracts and offchain book contracts across Arbitrum, Base, Blast, Sonic, and Avalanche networks
- **Event parameters**: Fee amounts (already denominated in USD with 18 decimal precision) and subaccount addresses for user identification
- **Trading data**: Both spot and perpetual derivatives trading activity from Vertex and Blitz products

## 3. Step-by-step calculation

### Component A: Fee collection
- **Purpose**: Aggregate total daily trading fees across all Vertex Protocol products and chains
- **Logic**: Extract `FillOrder` events from offchain exchange and book contracts. Filter to include only events where `isTaker` is true to prevent double-counting, as the protocol emits separate events for both maker and taker sides of each trade. Convert `feeAmount` values from 18-decimal USD format to standard USD amounts by dividing by 10^18. Group events by day and sum the converted fee amounts.
- **Key fields**: `feeAmount` (USD-denominated fees), `isTaker` (boolean flag), `block_timestamp` (event timing)

### Component B: Daily active user counting
- **Purpose**: Count unique daily active traders across all Vertex Protocol products and chains
- **Logic**: Extract `FillOrder` events from the same contract sources. Use the `subaccount` parameter to identify unique user addresses, labeling them as 'Trader' user type. Group by day and count distinct subaccount addresses. Apply HyperLogLog (HLL) aggregation technique for efficient distinct counting across multiple dimensional breakdowns including chain, product, and user type.
- **Key fields**: `subaccount` (user identifier), `block_timestamp` (event timing), derived `user_type` (set to 'Trader')

### Final aggregation
- **Combining components**: Join daily fee totals with daily active user counts by timestamp using the `calculate_arpu` macro
- **Currency conversion**: No additional conversion needed as fees are already in USD denomination from the source events
- **Time aggregation**: Both components use daily boundaries created by truncating `block_timestamp` to day level
- **Final calculation**: Divide total daily fees by daily active user count to produce average fees per user. Apply `finalize_metric_afpu` macro to standardize the output schema, validate data consistency, and fill any missing days with zero values to maintain a complete time series

## Critical guidelines

The calculation ensures accuracy by:
- Filtering to `isTaker=true` events only to avoid double-counting trade fees
- Using HyperLogLog for scalable distinct user counting across multiple dimensions
- Maintaining consistent daily time boundaries across both fee and user metrics
- Applying zero-fill strategy for missing data points to preserve time series continuity
- Aggregating across all supported chains (Arbitrum, Base, Blast, Sonic, Avalanche) and products (Vertex, Blitz)

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

VertexVRTX

Average fees per user (AFPU)

Average fees per user (AFPU)

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