Creators create and sell NFTs on Zora. They receive a cut of the primary sales (supply-side fees).

Zora is a non-custodial NFT minting protocol built on Ethereum and launched in 2021.

Team and investors own and govern the protocol. They currently take a cut the primary sales paid by collectors (revenue).

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Zora

# Zora Earnings Methodology

## 1. Overview

Zora earnings represents the protocol's net profit from NFT marketplace operations across Ethereum, Optimism, and Base networks. The metric is calculated as revenue minus expenses, where revenue comes from fees collected on NFT mints and expenses are currently zero (no token incentives). The calculation captures protocol fees from both ERC721 and ERC1155 NFT standards, handling legacy contracts with different fee structures.

## 2. Data sources

- **NFT mint events**: Parsed Zora marketplace events including `Sale` events for ERC721 mints and `Purchased` events for ERC1155 mints across Ethereum, Optimism, and Base networks
- **Protocol fee events**: `MintFeePayout` events from newer ERC721 contracts that explicitly track protocol fees collected
- **Payment tokens**: Wrapped ETH (WETH) addresses for each supported chain used as the primary payment method
- **External data**: End-of-day price feeds for WETH to USD conversion across all supported chains
- **Token metadata**: Decimal and formatting information for proper unit conversion from wei to ETH

## 3. Step-by-step calculation

### Component A: ERC721 mint revenue
- **Purpose**: Calculate protocol fees from ERC721 NFT mints using different methods based on contract version
- **Logic**: For newer contracts, extract actual protocol fees directly from `MintFeePayout` events which contain the `mintFeeAmount` field. For legacy contracts without fee payout events, apply a 5% fee rate to the total mint amount (calculated as `quantity` × `pricePerToken` from `Sale` events). Legacy mints are identified by performing a left join between mint events and fee payout events and selecting records where no matching fee payout exists
- **Key fields**: `mintFeeAmount` for direct fees, `quantity` and `pricePerToken` for calculating mint values, `address` for NFT contract identification

### Component B: ERC1155 mint revenue  
- **Purpose**: Calculate protocol fees from ERC1155 multi-edition NFT mints using a fixed fee structure
- **Logic**: Extract mint data from `Purchased` events and apply a fixed fee of 0.000777 ETH per mint. Calculate total fees by multiplying the `quantity` field by the fixed fee rate. This creates a predictable fee structure for multi-edition NFT collections
- **Key fields**: `quantity` for mint count, `value` for total transaction amount

### Component C: Expenses calculation
- **Purpose**: Track protocol expenses, primarily token incentives and operational costs
- **Logic**: Currently set to zero across all timestamps and chains. The system queries token incentives data but returns zero values, indicating Zora does not currently operate a token incentive program or track other operational expenses in this metric
- **Key fields**: `token_incentives` (always zero)

### Final aggregation
- **Combining components**: Sum all revenue sources (ERC721 fees, ERC1155 fees, legacy fees) and subtract total expenses to calculate earnings
- **Currency conversion**: Convert amounts from wei to ETH by applying decimal corrections, then convert to USD using end-of-day WETH price feeds for each respective chain
- **Time aggregation**: Aggregate all transactions within each calendar day using timestamp truncation to daily boundaries  
- **Final calculation**: Earnings equals total daily revenue minus total daily expenses. Since expenses are zero, earnings equals revenue from protocol fees across all NFT mint types and contract versions

*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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