The TRON (TRX) project started as a token issued on Ethereum, after which it moved to its own blockchain. As part of the ICO in 2017, the TRON Foundation raised 15,200 bitcoins by selling 40 billion TRX at a price of 0.00000038 BTC.
From the very beginning, the project followed the popular narratives of the time, positioning itself as an “Ethereum killer” but based on its code base. It got to the point where Vitalik Buterin publicly accused TRON founder Justin Sun of plagiarism.
Despite the endless stream of criticism directed at the platform itself and its founder, the project confidently enters the list of the most active on the crypto market, not inferior even to Ethereum. Oleg Cash Coin figured out how Justin Sun's team managed to do this.
In 2024, the total revenue of TRON's consensus participants exceeded that of the second-largest cryptocurrency by market cap, with the figure not falling below $140 million per month since May. For comparison, Ethereum was bringing in no more than $140 million per month to its validators during the same period.
ETH's financial performance is extremely volatile and can fluctuate between 40-60%, both up and down, while TRON is showing a stable upward trend.
In September, the TRX network surpassed ETH three times, earning $198.5 million versus $65.3 million. A similar stagnation in income for beneficiaries is observed in second-level solutions on Ethereum.
If the trend continues, TRON could become the leading blockchain in terms of revenue. As of early October 2024, Ethereum’s total revenue was $1.56 billion versus TRON’s $1.36 billion. It appears that the two networks have become major competitors in the altcoin market — at least in 2024.
Among the top 20 projects by capitalization, Justin Sun's brainchild turned out to be the third-largest asset after SUI and XRP in Q3 2024, showing a 21% increase in value.
During this same time, many coins have lost tens of percent: for example, Ethereum and Toncoin fell by more than 20%. TRX is one of the few cryptocurrencies whose price is in the region of the historical maximum of both 2018 and 2021 - in the range of $0.15–$0.16 per coin.
This may be due to the expansion of the TRON blockchain user base, as indicated by several statistics. The growth in metrics includes the number of daily transactions, which has changed from about 4 million at the beginning of the year to 8 million at the end of September. According to Tronscan, the number of daily active accounts has increased by about 60% over the same period, to 2.7 million.
These observations are supported by statistics on new accounts created on the network every day: their number also increased by approximately 40% over the observed period, to 240,000.
Approximately 35% of transaction activity is generated by USDT transfers. Despite attempts to return USDT users to Ethereum, almost 75% of the largest stablecoin's transactions are made on TRON.
It is significant that the largest number of new USDT users came to Justin Sun's project. Since the beginning of 2024, about 400,000 weekly new users of the stablecoin have been turning to the TRON network.
A common metric for evaluating a network of smart contracts and decentralized finance applications (DeFi) is the total value locked (TVL)
Unlike its competitors, TRX, although ranked second in TVL among all networks in the crypto market with $7.85 billion, has only 29 projects in its ecosystem. Three of them (JustLend, JustStables, and SUN) account for almost 100% of the total locked value.
The largest lending protocol, JustLend, has a TVL of $5.5 billion, of which 50% is wrapped BTC and only 25% is TRX. From this, we can conclude that DeFi on TRON is about 30% Bitcoin, and the rest is the native token. USDT does not have any significant share, but remains the most used asset after the native coin.
It can be assumed that such a high share of Bitcoin in the ecosystem came from the Tron Foundation itself, which held an ICO in 2017 by collecting in BTC, and not ETH, as was customary at that time. Consequently, there may still be coins of the main cryptocurrency on its balance.
Despite the skepticism towards TRON at the start, the project managed to capture one of the most sought-after niches in the crypto market — USDT. This allowed to organize the income stream not due to the growth of the price of the TRX coin, DeFi and NFT, but by using the stablecoin as a fiat transfer. This circumstance makes TRON one of the most observed blockchains by regulators in 2024.
At the same time, it became known that the leading company for monitoring blockchain transactions TRM Labs began publicly collaborating with Tether and TRON. They established an alliance to combat financial crimes, T3 Financial Crime Unit (T3 FCU). According to the project participants, the initiative is aimed at preventing the illegal use of USDT.
In parallel, TRM Labs CEO Esteban Castaño stated that the company has been collaborating with TRON since 2019, and Justin Sun's team has been funding monitoring tools for a long time.
Thus, the TRON blockchain is no longer some kind of gray area for shady operations, but strives to meet the standards of regulators.
