Zerion shows an aggregated view of a wallet's total crypto holdings. Through Zerion’s interface users are able to swap, send and borrow crypto assets.

Zerion is a non-custodial DeFi aggregator built on Ethereum and other adjacent blockchains. Zerion was founded by Evgeny Yurtaev, Alexey Bashlykov and Vadim Koleoshkin and launched in 2016.

Zerion owns and governs the platform. They currently charge a swap fee on the transactions that they route (revenue). Zerion’s investors include Gnosis, Wintermute, Blockchain Ventures etc.

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Zerion

# Zerion Expenses Methodology

## 1. Overview

Zerion expenses represents the daily USD value of token incentives paid by the Zerion protocol. This metric measures the cost of token-based rewards or incentives that Zerion distributes to users or liquidity providers. However, in the current implementation, Zerion expenses are hardcoded to zero, indicating that Zerion does not currently distribute token incentives.

The metric answers the business question: "How much does Zerion spend daily on token-based user incentives?" and uses a straightforward approach where token incentives are explicitly set to zero across all chains and time periods.

## 2. Data sources

The calculation draws from several underlying data sources, even though the final result is hardcoded:

- **Blockchain events**: Parsed Zerion `Router_Executed` events from seven blockchains (Arbitrum, Avalanche, BSC, Fantom, Gnosis, Optimism, and Polygon) containing trade execution data and fee information
- **Token metadata**: Token symbol and decimal information for identifying and processing different tokens in trading pairs
- **External data**: End-of-day token price feeds for USD conversion of fees and amounts
- **Transaction data**: Blockchain transaction timestamps for daily aggregation boundaries

## 3. Step-by-step calculation

### Component A: Trading data extraction
- **Purpose**: Extract all Zerion trading activity and fees across supported blockchains
- **Logic**: The system processes `Router_Executed` events from Zerion v1 contracts across seven blockchains. Each event contains trade details including input token, output token, amounts, and protocol fees. The system handles native assets by mapping the exception address `0xeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee` to chain-specific native tokens (ETH for Arbitrum/Optimism, AVAX for Avalanche, etc.). Invalid transactions are filtered out using a denylist. Trade data is classified with business metadata including 'Exchange' business line and 'infrastructure' market sector.
- **Key fields**: `block_timestamp` for timing, `inputToken` and `outputToken` for trading pairs, `absoluteInputAmount` and `absoluteOutputAmount` for volumes, `protocolFeeAmount` for fees collected

### Component B: Trading pair identification  
- **Purpose**: Create readable trading pair names for classification and reporting
- **Logic**: The system joins trade data with token metadata to retrieve token symbols. For each unique combination of input and output tokens on each chain, it creates a trading pair identifier. Native asset addresses are replaced with readable symbols (ETH, AVAX, BNB, etc.) while other tokens use their registered symbols from the token metadata. Trading pairs are formatted as "TOKEN0-TOKEN1" concatenations.
- **Key fields**: `token_0_symbol` and `token_1_symbol` combined into `account_name` for trading pair identification

### Component C: Fee calculation and USD conversion
- **Purpose**: Calculate daily trading fees in USD terms for potential use in incentive calculations
- **Logic**: Trading fees are extracted from the `fee_amount` field of each trade execution. Fees are aggregated by day using timestamp truncation to daily boundaries. The system converts all fee amounts to USD using end-of-day price feeds and corrects for token decimal places. Fees are grouped by chain, market sector, business segment, and product for detailed categorization.
- **Key fields**: `fee_amount` converted to USD, `timestamp` truncated to day level, `chain_id` for chain identification

### Component D: Token incentives determination
- **Purpose**: Calculate actual token incentives that would be distributed to users
- **Logic**: Despite having access to fee data from the previous component, the system explicitly sets all token incentives to zero. This is implemented by creating a dataset that mirrors the structure of the fees data but replaces all `token_incentives` values with 0. The system maintains the same temporal and dimensional structure (timestamp, chain, product) but nullifies any actual incentive amounts.
- **Key fields**: `token_incentives` hardcoded to 0, maintaining `timestamp`, `timestamp_grain`, `product_id`, and `chain_id` structure

### Final aggregation
- **Combining components**: The expenses metric directly takes the `token_incentives` field from the token incentives component and renames it to `expenses`
- **Currency conversion**: Already completed in earlier stages, though the final values are zero
- **Time aggregation**: Daily boundaries are maintained from the original timestamp truncation
- **Final calculation**: Expenses equals token incentives, which equals zero for all time periods and chains. The system applies the finalize_metric_expenses macro to ensure proper schema structure and gap filling, then filters results by chain availability to only include supported blockchain networks.

The final result is a daily time series of Zerion expenses that equals zero across all dimensions, indicating that Zerion currently does not distribute token-based incentives to users despite collecting protocol fees from trading activity.

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

Total project operating and incentive expenses.

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Expenses

Expenses

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Chain breakdown