Validators process transactions and receive validator rewards. Super representatives and super representative partners receive voting rewards. TRX stakers receive energy and bandwidth incentives.

Tron is a smart contract platform for decentralized applications (a blockchain). Tron was founded by Justin Sun and launched in 2018.

TRX holders own and govern the protocol. They currently burn all transaction fees paid by users (revenue). It is important to note that the incentives related to energy and bandwidth are effectively returned as revenue, and this is reflected in the earnings.

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Tron

# Tron Fees Methodology

## 1. Overview

The Tron fees metric measures the total daily transaction fees paid across the Tron blockchain network. This metric captures all forms of fee payments in the Tron ecosystem, including fees paid through Energy and Bandwidth resources obtained via staking TRX tokens, fees for Energy supplied by smart contracts, and direct TRX burns for transaction execution. The metric answers the business question of how much economic value is being captured by the Tron network through its unique dual-resource fee model, providing insights into network usage and economic activity.

## 2. Data sources

The calculation relies on several key data sources:
- **Tron transaction records**: Complete transaction data from the Tron blockchain including block timestamps, transaction hashes, gas usage information, energy consumption, bandwidth usage, and fee payment details from transaction receipts
- **End-of-day price feeds**: TRX token prices sourced from Chainlink price oracles for recent data (March 2021 onwards) and CoinGecko historical price data for earlier periods
- **Network parameter data**: Hardcoded bandwidth pricing parameters that reflect historical changes in Tron network economics, with specific breakpoints at network upgrade dates

## 3. Step-by-step calculation

### Component A: Transaction data processing
- **Purpose**: Extracts and processes raw transaction data from the Tron blockchain to calculate resource usage and fee components
- **Logic**: Retrieves all Tron transactions with their associated metadata including block timestamps, transaction hashes, sender/receiver addresses, and detailed receipt information. Processes energy usage data from `receipt_gas_used` and `receipt_info_energy_usage` fields. Calculates bandwidth consumption from `receipt_info_net_usage` or derives it by dividing `receipt_info_net_fee` by 1,000 when direct usage data is unavailable. Extracts direct TRX burn amounts from `receipt_info_fee` field and applies decimal correction by dividing by 1,000,000 to convert from base units to TRX
- **Key fields**: `block_timestamp` for daily aggregation, `energy_used` for energy consumption tracking, `bandwidth_used` for bandwidth resource consumption, `burns` for direct fee payments, `energy_staking_rewards_used` for staked energy consumption, `bandwidth_staking_rewards_used` for staked bandwidth consumption, and `energy_origin_energy_used` for contract-supplied energy

### Component B: Resource pricing calculation
- **Purpose**: Applies appropriate pricing for Energy and Bandwidth resources based on historical network parameters
- **Logic**: Uses hardcoded bandwidth pricing that reflects Tron network parameter changes over time. Applies a bandwidth price of 0.00014 for transactions before July 27, 2021, and 0.001 for transactions after this date. Matches transaction timestamps to appropriate pricing periods using timestamp range logic. Calculates effective energy prices from transaction receipt data using `receipt_effective_gas_price` divided by 1,000,000 for decimal correction
- **Key fields**: `effective_bandwidth_price` based on historical periods, `effective_energy_price` derived from transaction receipts

### Component C: Fee component aggregation
- **Purpose**: Calculates daily fee totals for each of the four distinct fee payment mechanisms in the Tron network
- **Logic**: Groups transactions by day and calculates four separate fee components. First component covers Energy from staking by multiplying `energy_staking_rewards_used` by `effective_energy_price`. Second component covers Bandwidth from staking by multiplying `bandwidth_staking_rewards_used` by `effective_bandwidth_price`. Third component covers Energy supplied by contracts by multiplying `energy_origin_energy_used` by `effective_energy_price`. Fourth component covers direct TRX burns for Energy and Bandwidth by summing the `burns` field. Each component is labeled with descriptive contract names for tracking different fee payment methods
- **Key fields**: Daily aggregated `fees` amounts for each component, `contract_name` labels distinguishing fee types, `timestamp` truncated to day boundaries

### Component D: Price conversion
- **Purpose**: Converts daily TRX fee amounts to USD using appropriate price feeds
- **Logic**: Joins daily fee data with TRX price information based on timestamp matching. Uses Chainlink price feeds for dates from March 2, 2021 onwards, as this represents the earliest available Chainlink data for TRX. Uses CoinGecko historical price data for all dates before March 2, 2021. Performs currency conversion by multiplying TRX fee amounts by the corresponding USD price for each day
- **Key fields**: `price` from price feeds, converted `fees` in USD

### Final aggregation
- **Combining components**: All four fee components (Energy from staking, Bandwidth from staking, Energy from contracts, and direct TRX burns) are combined using union operations to create a comprehensive daily fee dataset with separate rows for each fee type
- **Currency conversion**: TRX amounts are converted to USD by multiplying the native TRX fee amounts by end-of-day TRX prices, using Chainlink feeds for recent data and CoinGecko for historical periods before March 2021
- **Time aggregation**: All fee calculations are aggregated to daily boundaries using timestamp truncation to day level, ensuring consistent daily reporting periods
- **Final calculation**: The metric applies the `finalize_metric_fees` macro with a 'fill_zeros' strategy to standardize the output format, validate data integrity, and ensure no gaps in the time series. Chain availability filtering is applied to exclude data from periods when the chain was not operational or data was unavailable

*This methodology was automatically generated by Token Terminal's methodology analyzer.*

Total value users pay to use a protocol (gross fees, user-paid fees).

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