Protocol Fees
The total amount users pay to use a blockchain or an application, before any of it is divided among the parties who receive it.
Concrete examples make the category clearer than the label: gas paid to transact on a chain, the swap fee charged by an automated market maker, the interest borrowers pay in a lending market, and the minting or redemption fee some stablecoin issuers charge. Fees are a gross figure, so the important follow-up question is who keeps them, which is answered by the split between supply-side revenue and protocol revenue. Measurement caveats matter: fees are paid in whatever asset the user held and converted at some exchange rate, so a fee series is partly a price series, and venues that rebate fees or run incentive programs can report activity that costs users nothing on net.
In practice
The gas paid on a busy day is a fee figure for a blockchain, split between the base fee that is destroyed and the priority fee that goes to the block proposer.
The common misunderstanding
Fees paid by users are not a protocol's income; on most protocols the larger part goes to liquidity providers, validators, or miners rather than to a treasury or token holders.
The figure this maps to
The last thirty days of user-paid fees scaled up to a full-year rate.
Limits: The method assumes the last thirty days repeat twelve times, and digital-asset activity is episodic rather than steady: one congested month, one airdrop season or one liquidation cascade is multiplied by roughly twelve and presented as a yearly rate. Other research sites annualize from the trailing…