The TRON project (TRX) began as a token issued on Ethereum before transitioning to its own blockchain.
During its ICO in 2017, the TRON Foundation raised 15,200 bitcoins by selling 40 billion TRX at a price of 0.00000038 BTC.From the outset, the project followed popular narratives of the time, positioning itself as the "Ethereum killer," albeit based on Ethereum's own codebase.
This led to Vitalik Buterin publicly accusing TRON founder Justin Sun of plagiarism.
TRON's Revenue
In 2024, the total revenue generated by consensus participants in the TRON network surpassed that of the second-largest cryptocurrency, remaining above $140 million per month since May. In comparison, Ethereum's validators earned no more than $140 million monthly during the same period.
Ethereum's financial metrics are highly unstable, fluctuating between 40% and 60%, both upward and downward, while TRON demonstrates a steady upward trend.
In September, the TRX network outperformed ETH threefold, earning $198.5 million compared to $65.3 million. A similar stagnation in revenue for beneficiaries is observed in Ethereum's layer two solutions.
If this trend continues, TRON could become the leading blockchain in terms of revenue. As of early October 2024, Ethereum's total income stood at $1.56 billion compared to TRON's $1.36 billion.
It appears that these two networks have become primary competitors in the altcoin market — at least in 2024.
TRON's Business Model
Among the top 20 projects by market capitalization, Justin Sun's creation ranked third in growth after SUI and XRP for Q4 2024, showing a price increase of 21%.
During this same period, many coins lost significant value; for instance, Ethereum and Toncoin dropped by over 20%. TRX is one of the few cryptocurrencies whose price is near historical highs from both 2018 and 2021 ranging between $0.15 and $0.16 per coin.
This may be attributed to an expanding user base for the TRON blockchain, as evidenced by several statistics. Daily transaction numbers grew from approximately 4 million at the beginning of the year to 8 million by the end of September. According to Tronscan, the number of active accounts increased by about 60% during this period —reaching 2.7 million.
These observations are supported by statistics on new accounts created daily: their numbers also rose by about 40% over the observed period — up to 240,000.
Approximately 35% of transaction activity is generated by USDT transfers. Despite attempts to draw USDT users back to Ethereum, nearly 75% of transactions for the largest stablecoin occur on TRON.
Notably, the highest number of new USDT users has come to Justin Sun's project. Since early 2024, around 400,000 new weekly users of the stablecoin have been utilizing the TRON network.
DeFi on TRON
A common metric for assessing smart contract networks and decentralized finance (DeFi) applications is Total Value Locked (TVL).
Unlike its competitors, while TRX ranks second in TVL among all networks in the crypto market with $7.85 billion, its ecosystem comprises only 29 projects. Notably, three of these projects (JustLend, JustStables, and SUN) account for nearly 100% of the total locked value.
The largest lending protocol, JustLend, has a TVL of $5.5 billion, with 50% attributed to wrapped BTC and only 25% to TRX. This suggests that DeFi on TRON consists of approximately 30% bitcoin and the rest from its native token. USDT holds no significant share but remains the most utilized asset after the native coin.
It can be speculated that such a high proportion of bitcoin within the ecosystem stems from the Tron Foundation itself, which conducted its ICO in BTC rather than ETH as was customary at that time. Consequently, it is possible that it still holds a balance of bitcoin.
Conclusions
Despite initial skepticism towards TRON, the project has managed to capture one of the most sought-after niches in the crypto market — USDT. This has allowed it to generate revenue not through rising prices for TRX or through DeFi and NFTs but rather by utilizing stablecoins as fiat transfers. This situation makes TRON one of the most closely monitored blockchains by regulators in 2024.
At the same time, it has been revealed that leading blockchain transaction monitoring company TRM Labs has begun publicly collaborating with Tether and TRON.
They have established an alliance to combat financial crimes called T3 Financial Crime Unit (T3 FCU). According to project participants, this initiative aims to curb illegal use of USDT.
Simultaneously, TRM Labs CEO Esteban Castano stated that his company has been collaborating with TRON since 2019 and that Justin Sun's team has long funded monitoring tools.
Thus, the TRON blockchain is no longer viewed as a gray area for shadow operations but is striving to meet regulatory standards.
