First published 16 April 2020. Expanded in October 2026 so the fee system and the dollar token are not left as folklore. TRON is a public ledger that produces blocks through a small elected set, not through Bitcoin-style mining. TRX is the native coin. You use it to pay fees when you have not already staked for resources, and you stake it to vote for the block producers. A token on TRON is not TRX. The one people mean, most of the time, is Tether.
What is Tether (USDT)? is that dollar token. This page is the chain it often rides on, and the coin the chain itself uses.
Where it came from
Justin Sun announced the project in 2017. The first token was an ERC-20 on Ethereum. In June 2018 TRON launched its own chain and holders were invited to swap. If you held the Ethereum token and did not swap, you did not automatically hold TRX on the new ledger. A founder and a foundation sit beside the software. They do not have to sign your payment for a block to include it. A chain with 27 block producers is still a small room. Call that a design, not a slogan about openness.
Who produces blocks
TRON uses delegated proof of stake. Holders stake TRX and vote. The top 27 candidates, called super representatives, take turns producing blocks, on the order of every three seconds. A further slice of candidates, down the vote ranking, does not produce blocks but still shares voter rewards. The numbers of seats are protocol constants. The rewards per block are parameters those producers can change by proposal. Each block mints new TRX for the producer and for voters, and fees burn TRX. There is no 21 million cap. Supply goes up with rewards and down with burns. Which force wins on a given day is an outcome, not a promise.
Twenty-seven producers is a smaller set of people who can stall or censor than a chain anyone with hardware can extend. The trade is speed and a cheap transfer. Name it as a trade.
Bandwidth, energy, and a new account
An ordinary transfer spends bandwidth. A smart-contract call also spends energy. Accounts get a small free bandwidth allowance — the chain parameter has long been 600 units, refilling over a day — and energy has no free allowance. If the allowance does not cover the whole transfer, the chain burns a little TRX. Staking TRX can pay for bandwidth or energy instead of burning. The burn rates are parameters. A tutorial that quotes a fee in TRX is quoting a day.
A brand-new address is not free to open. The first transfer in has to pay an account-creation cost. A wallet error about activation is that rule. The coins have not vanished into a different city. They have not been accepted yet.
USDT is not TRX, and T is not 0x
TRON addresses start with T. Ethereum addresses start with 0x. They are not interchangeable, even when a multi-coin app shows both under one login. TRC-20 is the token standard, the cousin of ERC-20. USDT on TRON is a TRC-20. Sending it to an exchange’s Ethereum USDT address fails the usual way: right ticker, wrong notebook. The wrong network is still the wrong city.
TRX itself is not a dollar. A page that says “send TRON” may mean the coin or the network. Read which asset the deposit screen named. Nothing here is an instruction to buy, stake, or vote TRX.
