Follow the money. Keep the layers separate.

01 / Scope

Four questions, four independent layers

Product income records user fees, what the protocol retains and known expenses. Use of funds records allocations, executed purchases, actual distributions and reserves. Token supply records issuance and destruction in token units. Holder access records the exact rights and conditions of a position.

An application, a network, a product and a deployment have different scopes. Parent totals are not added to included products; aggregate totals are not added to the transactions they already cover.

02 / Metric dictionary

What each amount means

The source definition, included products, chains and versions travel with an observation. Expenses that are not covered remain unknown.

Fees

Amounts paid by users within the stated scope. Some may go directly to liquidity providers, validators or other participants.

Protocol revenue

The portion retained by the protocol under the source definition. It is not net profit when operating expenses are incomplete. No true P/E is calculated from it.

Executed buybacks

Confirmed spending on market purchases, with an execution basis. A holders-revenue proxy or allocation percentage is not an executed buyback.

Direct distributions

Actual transfers to eligible recipients. Purchased and later distributed tokens must not be counted twice as a combined benefit.

Reserve acquisitions

Assets acquired into a reserve. They are not automatically distributed or permanently removed from supply.

Burns

Destruction of token units. Network fee burn and treasury burn have separate sources; a treasury burn is not evidence of market spending.

03 / Accounting

One economic chain is counted once

Illustrative example: buying 2 million tokens for $10 million and then burning them records $10 million of spending and 2 million token units destroyed. It does not record $20 million of cash flow.

Transfers between a protocol’s own accounts do not create revenue. Distributions can be financed from past reserves, token sales or debt; they are not constrained to be below the current period’s revenue. Funding sources remain explicit.

04 / Time

A run rate is an extrapolation

Only a complete rolling window of N calendar days supports this annualized run rate. For 30 days the multiplier is 365/30. A calendar-month figure multiplied by 12 is a different measure and must be labelled as such.

A full 365-day observation is the observed amount. Missing days are not replaced with zero or silently scaled up. The window uses UTC dates and an explicit cutoff; the run rate is neither a forecast nor a promised return.

05 / Ratios

A valuation ratio is not a personal yield

Market cap divided by a comparable annualized protocol revenue amount is a revenue multiple, not P/E. The buyback-to-market-cap ratio describes observed protocol spending relative to a market value, not a cash return paid to an individual holder.

Numerator and denominator must have compatible assets, units, scope and timestamps. A missing, non-positive or incompatible denominator prevents a ratio. Distributions to ve positions are not divided by all circulating tokens and labelled a staking yield.

06 / Supply

Issuance is measured in token units

Net issuance is valid for one canonical asset and one covered period, with special mechanisms such as rebasing accounted for. An unlock of existing tokens does not increase minted supply. A wrapped mint used in a bridge does not establish global issuance.

Unlocks are a schedule of changing availability. Dollar valuations of future unlocks must disclose the chosen price and are scenarios rather than evidence of selling.

07 / Data quality

Three independent kinds of status

Zero is a confirmed numerical observation. Unknown and not applicable are not zero. A stale observation keeps its original source timestamp; collecting an old response again does not make the observation new.

Observation

Observed, estimated, partial, unknown or not applicable. Estimates retain their basis and partial observations retain their gaps.

Freshness

Current, stale or unavailable. This describes the source observation, not whether the protocol’s economic mechanism is active.

Mechanism

Proposed, approved but not active, active, paused, ended or unknown. Each change requires dated evidence.

08 / Reproducibility

Keep sources, versions and rights attached

A snapshot records the methodology version, period, cutoff, source references, source timestamps, collection time and market-data time. Corrections and source revisions must remain distinguishable from newly observed economic events.

Permission to display a field on this site does not automatically permit a download, public API or third-party embed. Those surfaces filter fields by separately documented capabilities. An unavailable source does not justify replacing an unknown amount with a convenient number.

09 / Participation

Verify the asset and the conditions

A token, an NFT, an activated position and a payout asset are not interchangeable. Participation may require staking, locking, voting or activation, and may involve unlock delays or claim costs.

A personal yield requires verified eligibility, the correct qualifying denominator and a defined period. This screener does not infer it from protocol-wide spending or supply reduction.