Miners process transactions and receive fees from users (supply-side fees).

Zcash is a distributed ledger for transfer and store of value (a blockchain). Zcash was founded by Matthew Green, Ian Miers, Christina Garman and launched in 2016.

ZEC holders own and govern the protocol. They currently do not take a cut of the total transaction fees paid by users (revenue). Zcash’s investors include Fenbushi Capital, Pantera Capital, Digital Currency Group, etc.

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Zcash

# Zcash Earnings Methodology

## 1. Overview

The Zcash earnings metric measures the protocol's daily net financial performance by calculating the difference between revenue and expenses. For Zcash, this metric is always negative because the protocol operates as a pure cryptocurrency that issues block rewards (expenses) to miners but does not collect transaction fees as revenue. The earnings calculation follows the formula: Earnings = Revenue - Expenses, where revenue is always zero and expenses consist entirely of token incentives paid to miners through block rewards.

## 2. Data sources

The calculation relies on these underlying data sources:

- **Zcash blockchain transaction records**: Complete transaction data including coinbase transactions that contain block rewards, transaction inputs and outputs, and fee-related information
- **End-of-day token price feeds**: ZEC token price data used for USD conversion of block rewards and earnings values
- **Token metadata**: ZEC token information including symbol, decimal precision, and external identifiers needed for price feed integration

## 3. Step-by-step calculation

### Component A: Token incentives extraction
- **Purpose**: Identifies and calculates daily block rewards paid to miners
- **Logic**: The system filters all Zcash transactions to find coinbase transactions using the `is_coinbase` flag. For each coinbase transaction, it sums all output values in zatoshis to determine the total block reward for that block. These rewards are then grouped by daily timestamps and aggregated to get total daily incentives. The zatoshi amounts are converted to ZEC tokens by dividing by 1e8, following Zcash's decimal precision standard.
- **Key fields**: Uses `block_timestamp` for daily grouping, `is_coinbase` flag for transaction filtering, `outputs` array containing `valueZat` amounts for reward calculation

### Component B: Expenses calculation  
- **Purpose**: Processes token incentives as protocol expenses
- **Logic**: Takes the daily token incentives calculated in Component A and treats them as the protocol's operational expenses. The ZEC amounts are converted to USD using end-of-day price feeds through the currency conversion process. The expenses data is then validated and standardized with proper schema formatting and gap-filling to ensure complete daily time series.
- **Key fields**: Uses `token_incentives_native` amounts, applies USD conversion to create `expenses` values, maintains daily `timestamp` and `timestamp_grain` fields

### Component C: Revenue calculation
- **Purpose**: Determines protocol revenue (always zero for Zcash)
- **Logic**: Zcash revenue is explicitly set to zero because the protocol operates as a pure cryptocurrency that does not collect transaction fees as revenue. While the system references transaction fees data for completeness, the actual revenue value is hardcoded to 0 for all time periods. This reflects Zcash's design where transaction fees are not retained by the protocol.
- **Key fields**: Creates `revenue` field with constant value of 0, maintains consistent `timestamp` and dimensional fields for proper metric alignment

### Final aggregation
- **Combining components**: The earnings calculation uses the standard formula: Earnings = Revenue - Expenses. Since revenue is always 0 and expenses equal the token incentives, the result is: Earnings = 0 - Token Incentives = -Token Incentives
- **Currency conversion**: All ZEC amounts are converted to USD using end-of-day price feeds before final aggregation, ensuring consistent currency representation across all financial metrics
- **Time aggregation**: Data is aggregated at daily boundaries using timestamp truncation to day level, with proper timezone handling for consistent daily breakdowns
- **Final calculation**: The final earnings value represents the negative of daily token incentives, showing the protocol's daily cost of block rewards as a negative earnings figure in USD

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

Net profit (also profits, net income, profitability) — revenue remaining after subtracting expenses.

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Earnings

Earnings

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