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 Expenses Methodology

## 1. Overview

Vertex expenses represents the daily USD value of token incentives paid out by the Vertex protocol for trading activities. This metric captures the protocol's expenditure on user acquisition and retention through trading reward programs. The calculation focuses specifically on VRTX token incentives distributed to traders on the Arbitrum network, providing insight into the protocol's cost structure for maintaining trading volume and user engagement.

## 2. Data sources

- **Blockchain events**: Parsed Vertex protocol claim events from multiple blockchains including Arbitrum, Avalanche, and Sonic networks, specifically `ClaimVrtx` and `ClaimArb` events from various airdrop contracts
- **Token price data**: End-of-day price feeds for VRTX token to enable USD conversion
- **Token metadata**: VRTX token contract information including decimal precision for proper amount calculation

## 3. Step-by-step calculation

### Component A: Trading incentive event extraction
- **Purpose**: Collect all trading incentive claim events from Vertex protocol contracts across supported blockchains
- **Logic**: Extract claim events from multiple Vertex airdrop contracts across Arbitrum, Avalanche, and Sonic networks. Each event contains the claimer's address, claimed token amount, and transaction details. Events are classified by business line as "Perpetual trading" within the "derivatives" market sector and "perpetual" business segment
- **Key fields**: `address` (account claiming incentives), `amount` (raw token amount claimed), `block_timestamp` (event timestamp), `token_address` (contract address of claimed token)

### Component B: Chain and token filtering
- **Purpose**: Focus the calculation on VRTX token incentives distributed on Arbitrum network only
- **Logic**: Filter the multi-chain event data to include only VRTX token claims from Arbitrum network. This filtering uses the specific VRTX token contract address `0x95146881b86b3ee99e63705ec87afe29fcc044d9` on the Arbitrum chain to isolate the primary trading incentive token
- **Key fields**: `chain` (blockchain identifier), `token_address` (filtered to VRTX contract address)

### Component C: Daily aggregation and business classification
- **Purpose**: Group incentive payments by day and assign proper business metadata
- **Logic**: Truncate event timestamps to daily boundaries and maintain business classification fields including chain identifier, business line, market sector, and business segment. The aggregation preserves individual account addresses and token amounts for subsequent USD conversion
- **Key fields**: `timestamp` (daily truncated), `timestamp_grain` (set to 'day'), `chain_id` (Arbitrum), `account_address` (incentive recipient), `token_incentives` (raw VRTX amount)

### Component D: Currency conversion and decimal correction
- **Purpose**: Convert raw VRTX token amounts to USD values with proper decimal handling
- **Logic**: Apply USD conversion using end-of-day VRTX token prices and correct for the token's decimal precision. This process converts the raw blockchain integer amounts to human-readable token quantities and then to USD values using the appropriate exchange rate for each day
- **Key fields**: `token_incentives` (converted to USD), price data alignment by date, decimal-corrected amounts

### Final aggregation
- **Combining components**: The processed trading incentive data flows through a finalization macro that ensures proper schema compliance, validates all identifier fields, and implements gap-filling logic
- **Currency conversion**: USD conversion occurs after decimal correction using end-of-day VRTX token prices matched to the event date
- **Time aggregation**: Daily boundaries are established by truncating block timestamps to day level, with any missing dates filled with zero values
- **Final calculation**: The final expenses metric is simply the USD-converted token incentive amounts, renamed from `token_incentives` to `expenses` to reflect the protocol's perspective of these payments as operational costs rather than rewards distributed

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

Total project operating and incentive expenses.

VertexVRTX

Expenses

Expenses

Competitive landscape

Chain breakdown