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.

governance

github

twitter

discord

etherscan

website

Blockchains (L1)

Tron

# Tron Supply-side fees Methodology

## 1. Overview

Supply-side fees represent the portion of transaction fees that are distributed to network participants who provide infrastructure or services to support the blockchain. For Tron, supply-side fees are always zero because the network burns all fees rather than distributing them to validators, stakers, or other supply-side participants. This methodology calculates the underlying fee structure first, then applies Tron's protocol-specific rule that all fees are protocol fees (burned) rather than supply-side fees (distributed).

## 2. Data sources

The calculation uses several data sources to build the underlying fee structure before zeroing out supply-side portions:

- **Tron transaction data**: Raw transaction records from the Tron blockchain including receipt information about resource usage, fees, and gas consumption
- **End-of-day TRX price feeds**: Price data from Chainlink oracle feeds for TRX/USD conversion, available from March 2, 2021 onwards
- **Historical TRX price data**: CoinGecko daily price feeds for TRX/USD conversion covering periods before Chainlink data availability
- **Resource pricing rules**: Hardcoded bandwidth pricing that changes over time based on network governance decisions

## 3. Step-by-step calculation

### Component A: Resource usage extraction
- **Purpose**: Extract energy and bandwidth consumption data from Tron transactions
- **Logic**: Parse transaction receipt fields to identify different types of resource usage including `energy_used` for computational resources, `bandwidth_used` for network and storage resources, `energy_staking_rewards_used` for energy obtained through TRX staking, `energy_origin_energy_used` for energy supplied by smart contracts, and `bandwidth_staking_rewards_used` for bandwidth obtained through staking
- **Key fields**: The `receipt_gas_used` field provides energy consumption, `receipt_info_net_usage` or calculated bandwidth from `receipt_info_net_fee` provides bandwidth usage, and various receipt fields track different resource allocation methods

### Component B: Resource pricing
- **Purpose**: Apply pricing to energy and bandwidth resources to calculate fee amounts
- **Logic**: Energy pricing uses the `receipt_effective_gas_price` from each transaction converted from SUN units to TRX. Bandwidth pricing applies hardcoded rates that change over time - 0.00014 TRX per unit before July 27, 2021, and 0.001 TRX per unit afterwards. The pricing model accounts for resources obtained through staking versus direct payment
- **Key fields**: The `effective_energy_price` comes from transaction receipts, while `effective_bandwidth_price` uses the time-based lookup against hardcoded pricing rules

### Component C: TRX burn calculation
- **Purpose**: Calculate direct TRX burns for resource payments
- **Logic**: Extract the `receipt_info_fee` field from transactions which represents TRX burned directly to pay for energy and bandwidth resources. Convert from SUN units to TRX by dividing by 1e6
- **Key fields**: The `burns` field represents the raw TRX amount burned per transaction

### Component D: Fee aggregation by type
- **Purpose**: Aggregate different fee components by day and fee type
- **Logic**: Group transactions by day and calculate total fees for four categories - energy obtained from staking rewards multiplied by effective energy price, bandwidth obtained from staking rewards multiplied by bandwidth price, energy supplied by contracts multiplied by energy price, and direct TRX burns for energy and bandwidth payment. Each category represents a different mechanism for paying transaction costs
- **Key fields**: Daily aggregated `fees` amounts for each of the four fee categories with appropriate metadata fields

### Component E: USD conversion
- **Purpose**: Convert TRX-denominated fees to USD values
- **Logic**: Join daily aggregated fees with end-of-day TRX price feeds, using Chainlink prices from March 2, 2021 onwards and CoinGecko prices for earlier periods. Multiply TRX fee amounts by the corresponding daily TRX/USD price
- **Key fields**: The `price` field from price feeds and final `fees` amounts in USD

### Final aggregation
- **Combining components**: Sum all fee categories (energy from staking, bandwidth from staking, energy from contracts, direct burns) that have been converted to USD to get total protocol fees
- **Currency conversion**: Use end-of-day TRX/USD prices with Chainlink as the primary source and CoinGecko for historical data before March 2021
- **Time aggregation**: Aggregate transaction-level data to daily boundaries using timestamp truncation to day granularity
- **Final calculation**: Set all supply-side fees to zero regardless of the underlying total fee amounts, reflecting Tron's protocol design where all fees are burned rather than distributed to network participants

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

Portion of fees distributed to service providers or supply-side participants.

TronTRX

Supply-side fees

Supply-side fees

Competitive landscape