On 24 September TRON DAO announced that more than 30 trillion dollars had now moved across its network. Two weeks earlier, the first US staking ETF on the chain's token had started trading, Canary Staked TRX. On 10 September it turned over 16,700 dollars, with zero net inflows, according to SoSoValue.
Both fit together once you separate what is being counted. The 30 trillion are dollars running through a pipe. The ETF is a bet on the toll charged at that pipe. To understand Tron you have to keep the two apart: what is this chain, who uses it for what, and how much of that reaches the token?
Tron is a pipe run by 27 operators
Tron's mainnet went live on 31 May 2018 and has run on its own chain since 25 June 2018. A new block arrives every three seconds. Blocks are produced by 27 so-called Super Representatives, elected by TRX holders with staked tokens. The same 27 vote on protocol changes, including fees.
Fees are paid in two resources, bandwidth and energy. Whoever stakes TRX gets an allowance of both and sends at no extra cost. Whoever has none pays in TRX, and that TRX is burned.
A USDT transfer to an address that already holds USDT uses about 64,000 units of energy. Since 29 August 2025 a unit costs 100 sun instead of 210; a sun is a millionth of a TRX. That comes to about 6.4 TRX, a little over 2 dollars at the 24 September price. To an address without a USDT balance it is about 134,000 units, 13.4 TRX or roughly 4.60 dollars.
Tron doesn't sell room for financial experiments. It sells room for transfers.
Tether brought USDT to the chain in March 2019. The next number shows what came of it.
Half of all Tether dollars
Tether's transparency report shows how much USDT circulates on each chain. As of 24 September 2026:
| Chain | USDT in circulation | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Tron | $92.7bn | 50.4 % |
| Ethereum | $86.4bn | 47.0 % |
| Solana | $2.7bn | 1.4 % |
Counting all stablecoins, Ethereum leads with $146.1bn according to DefiLlama, Tron follows with $94.1bn. The gap is almost entirely USDC and smaller dollar tokens living on Ethereum. On Tron, stablecoins are almost exclusively USDT.
This grew from almost nothing in six years. At the start of 2020 Tron held $0.9bn in stablecoins, at the start of 2022 already $36.9bn, at the start of 2026 $81.7bn. The last twelve months added 22.9 %.
Tron is not a crypto chain that happens to carry stablecoins. It is a stablecoin chain that happens to have a token.
With that much money sitting there, what is it doing?
On Tron, money gets sent, not lent
The value locked in DeFi applications (TVL) on Tron stood at $5.65bn on 25 September, according to DefiLlama. That is fifth among all chains and 62 % below the peak of $14.7bn on 4 December 2024. Tronscan shows $28.9bn, but includes $15.4bn of staked TRX. TRON DAO's figure of $28bn uses that second definition.
The more telling comparison is with the stablecoins on the same chain:
| Chain | Stablecoins | DeFi TVL | DeFi per stablecoin dollar |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ethereum | $146.1bn | $53.4bn | 37 cents |
| Tron | $94.1bn | $5.65bn | 6 cents |
On Ethereum a good share of the dollars is at work in lending and trading protocols. On Tron they sit and wait for the next transfer.
Activity on the chain confirms it, with one catch. Tronscan counted 4.43 million active accounts a day on a 30-day average to 24 September, 51 % more than a year earlier. Transactions rose 26 % to 11.5 million a day. USDT transfers did not move: 2.29 million a day, down 0.4 %.
More than half of the increase came from TRC-10 transfers, an older token standard that has nothing to do with USDT: from 225,000 to 1.55 million a day. If you read the chain's record numbers as growth in Tether payments, you are reading the wrong row.
The USDT stock grew by almost a quarter; the number of USDT transfers did not. So who is moving this money at all?
Who uses the pipe
Tronscan counts 76.8 million addresses on Tron holding USDT. On 25 September it showed $27.2bn of USDT transferred in 24 hours. There is no independent breakdown by country. Chainalysis's Geography of Crypto report 2025 finds that USDT dominates in emerging regions (Africa, the Middle East, Asia-Pacific, Latin America) and USDC in advanced economies. Exchanges hold large balances on Tron: DefiLlama counts $2.9bn at HTX alone and $1.6bn at Bybit.
The same properties also attract money that prefers not to be seen. In its 2026 Crypto Crime Report, TRM Labs gives three reasons why Russian and Iranian sanctions-evasion networks prefer USDT on Tron: low fees, deep liquidity and broad acceptance among brokers. For 2024, TRM attributed 58 % of illicit crypto volume to Tron, over 26 of 45 billion dollars. For 2025, neither TRM nor Chainalysis reports a Tron share.
Against that stands a switch that sits with Tether, not Tron. On 23 April 2026 Tether froze about 344 million USDT on two Tron addresses that the US Treasury attributes to Iran's central bank. On 16 July another 131 million followed on four more addresses. The joint unit of Tether, TRON and TRM Labs reported more than 450 million dollars frozen by May 2026.
USDT on Tron is cheap and fast. Censorship-resistant money it is not, and USDT isn't that on any chain.
So the pipe is growing. That leaves the question investors care about: what does the token get out of it?
The pipe grows, the toll falls
Every fee on Tron is burned. According to DefiLlama, users paid $424m in 2023, $578m in 2024 and $579m in 2025. That was the link between usage and token: more transfers, more TRX burned, fewer tokens in circulation.
On 29 August 2025 the Super Representatives cut the energy price by more than half. Fee revenue fell from $61.5m in August 2025 to $37.6m in September and $26.5m in August 2026. Over twelve months Tronscan shows 1.13bn TRX burned and 1.43bn newly issued. Supply rose 0.32 % to 94.97bn TRX. After the block-reward cut in June 2025, Bitget News had projected annual deflation of 1.29 %.
The last twelve months side by side:
| Metric | Change |
|---|---|
| Stablecoins on Tron | +22.9 % |
| Active accounts (30-day average) | +51 % |
| Fee revenue (August to August) | −57 % |
| TRX supply | +0.32 % |
| TRX price (365 days) | +0.6 % |
More usage gave the token no tailwind last year. The toll fell faster than usage rose.
There are also buyers who do not depend on usage. 48 % of all TRX is staked. Tron Inc., a Nasdaq-listed company holding TRX as a reserve, last reported 715.8m TRX, 0.75 % of supply. The Canary ETF held 148.4m TRX on 14 September.
How has the price behaved over these years?
Since 2023 TRX has rarely fallen with Bitcoin, and rarely risen with it
Monthly returns in US dollars from Binance monthly candles, June 2018 to August 2026, 99 complete months:
| Jun 2018 to Dec 2022 (55 months) | Jan 2023 to Aug 2026 (44 months) | |
|---|---|---|
| Swing of monthly return, TRX / BTC | 27.0 / 21.7 % | 9.1 / 14.9 % |
| Months in which BTC fell | 30 | 17 |
| … of those, TRX did better than BTC | 15 | 16 |
| Median in those months, TRX / BTC | −11.8 / −8.6 % | +1.1 / −7.1 % |
| Months in which BTC rose: TRX did better | 8 of 25 | 7 of 27 |
Until the end of 2022, TRX swung more than Bitcoin. Since 2023 it has swung about a third less, held up better in 16 of 17 falling Bitcoin months and lagged in 20 of 27 rising ones. Over the last 90 days TRX rose 6.1 %, Bitcoin 40.5 %.
TRX has behaved like a shock absorber, not an engine.
Calendar years, from the first price in January to the last in December:
| Year | TRX | BTC |
|---|---|---|
| 2018 (from June) | −62.6 % | −50.5 % |
| 2019 | −28.8 % | +94.4 % |
| 2020 | +101.3 % | +302.0 % |
| 2021 | +181.6 % | +59.8 % |
| 2022 | −27.7 % | −64.2 % |
| 2023 | +97.5 % | +155.6 % |
| 2024 | +136.7 % | +121.3 % |
| 2025 | +11.7 % | −6.3 % |
| 2026 (to 25 Sep) | +18.9 % | −3.8 % |
The all-time high on a closing basis was 0.4334 dollars on 3 December 2024. On 24 September TRX closed at 0.3403 dollars, 21.5 % below. None of these figures include staking rewards; StakingRewards currently shows 3.2 % a year.
The obvious objection
"Then the calm is proof that usage is holding up the price."
The calm began in 2023, while fees were rising. But it also held after fees were halved. Since September 2025 Bitcoin fell in 7 of 12 months; TRX did better in 6 of them, at a median of −1.7 against −10.2 %. Over the same period less TRX was burned than issued. So the burn mechanism does not explain last year's calm. What does explain it, this data does not show.
What this means for you
When you send USDT on Tron, you are using the chain that holds the most Tether. The fee is due in TRX, a little over 2 dollars to an existing USDT address and about twice that to a new one. Tether can freeze there as anywhere.
When you buy TRX, you are not buying the growth of the Tether supply. You are buying a token whose toll was just cut, which has been slightly inflationary for twelve months, and which since 2023 has been calmer than Bitcoin in falling months and mostly slower in rising ones.
Using Tron and holding TRX are two different decisions.
Three numbers show whether that changes: Tron's USDT share against Ethereum's (50.4 against 47.0 %), the number of USDT transfers a day (2.29 million, unchanged for a year), and monthly fees against new issuance (26.5 million dollars burned against about 119 million new TRX a month). The open question is whether the lower fee brought more Tether transfers at all. After twelve months the numbers say: not yet.
FAQ
Why two different TVL figures? DefiLlama counts only money in DeFi applications ($5.65bn). Tronscan and TRON DAO include staked TRX ($28.9bn). Both are correct, but only the first is comparable with other chains.
Is the 30 trillion dollars of volume verified? No. The figure comes from a TRON DAO press release and counts every transfer, including between wallets of the same exchange. It appears in the text as the occasion, not as evidence.
How are the monthly returns calculated? Opening price on the first day of the month to closing price on the last, TRX and BTC each against USDT on Binance, without fees and without staking rewards. September 2026 is still running and is left out of the monthly comparisons.
How large is 58 % illicit volume? For 2024 and across all chains, TRM Labs attributed 45 billion dollars to illicit sources, over 26 billion of it on Tron. TRM does not say what share of total Tron volume that is. Chainalysis puts the illicit share across all chains at under 1 % of volume.
All TRX monthly returns in US dollars
| Year | Jan | Feb | Mar | Apr | May | Jun | Jul | Aug | Sep | Oct | Nov | Dec |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2018 | −24.9 | −10.3 | −25.1 | −12.0 | 0.7 | −35.2 | 28.7 | |||||
| 2019 | 34.5 | −5.9 | −0.9 | 0.3 | 40.8 | −3.2 | −30.0 | −30.9 | −6.1 | 35.9 | −21.7 | −14.1 |
| 2020 | 40.4 | −11.7 | −29.8 | 31.2 | 4.2 | 3.4 | 20.2 | 48.2 | −10.1 | −1.8 | 25.6 | −17.3 |
| 2021 | 17.8 | 44.6 | 103.9 | 42.2 | −41.9 | −11.1 | −6.3 | 38.8 | 0.8 | 13.5 | −4.9 | −21.9 |
| 2022 | −21.6 | 4.5 | 19.6 | −15.2 | 34.8 | −23.2 | 6.2 | −7.9 | −3.8 | 3.7 | −13.7 | −0.2 |
| 2023 | 14.1 | 11.0 | −5.1 | 2.4 | 12.0 | 1.3 | 2.3 | −1.5 | 15.5 | 9.7 | 6.5 | 4.0 |
| 2024 | 4.3 | 25.2 | −12.5 | −2.8 | −6.2 | 11.2 | 3.2 | 22.5 | −1.0 | 8.0 | 21.7 | 24.4 |
| 2025 | −0.4 | −8.1 | 2.4 | 3.2 | 7.8 | 5.3 | 16.2 | 4.9 | −2.2 | −11.2 | −5.0 | 1.1 |
| 2026 | 0.7 | −1.7 | 11.1 | 4.2 | 7.6 | −10.2 | 3.4 | 2.0 | 1.8* |
Figures in percent. *September 2026 to 25 Sep, month not complete.
Not investment advice, not a recommendation, not a forecast. Historical patterns are not a promise.
Sources: Tether Transparency (as of 24 Sep 2026) · DefiLlama: stablecoins by chain, chain TVL, Tron TVL history, Tron chain fees, protocols (25 Sep 2026) · Tronscan API: statistics overview, supply, staking (24/25 Sep 2026) · Binance TRXUSDT/BTCUSDT monthly candles (25 Sep 2026) · Backtesting Arena, asset snapshot TRXUSDT (24 Sep 2026) · TRON DAO press release via GlobeNewswire (24 Sep 2026) · Crypto Times on the Canary TRX ETF, citing SoSoValue (13 Sep 2026) · Canary Staked TRX ETF, 424B3 prospectus (8 Sep 2026) · Tron Inc., 8-K (13 Aug 2026) and update via The Coin Republic (24 Sep 2026) · Tether: USDT on TRON (4 Mar 2019) · TRON DAO, Mainnet Timeline FAQ (2018) · Chaingateway, TRON Fee Calculator (checked 4 Jul 2026) · crypto.news, Proposal 102 (June 2025) · Bitget News, deflation projection (June 2025) · StakingRewards, TRON (25 Sep 2026) · Chainalysis, Geography of Crypto 2025 via CoinDesk (6 Sep 2025) and Crypto Crime Report 2026 · TRM Labs, Crypto Crime Report 2025 (17 Feb 2025) and 2026 (28 Jan 2026) · Tether freeze announcements (23 Apr 2026, 14 May 2026) · CoinDesk on the Iran wallets (16 Jul 2026)
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