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 Median transaction fee Methodology

## 1. Overview

The Tron transaction fee median measures the typical cost users pay for transactions on the Tron network, expressed as the daily median fee in USD. This metric provides insight into the network's affordability and usage patterns by calculating the middle value of all transaction fees paid each day.

Tron's fee structure is unique among blockchains, combining multiple resource types including bandwidth usage, energy consumption, and direct TRX burns. The calculation captures this multi-component fee structure and converts the median daily fee from TRX to USD using historical price feeds.

## 2. Data sources

- **Tron transaction records**: Complete transaction data from the Tron blockchain including gas usage, bandwidth consumption, energy usage, receipt status, and fee information
- **End-of-day price feeds**: TRX token prices in USD from two sources - Chainlink price feeds for data from March 2, 2021 onwards, and CoinGecko daily price data for historical prices before that date
- **Bandwidth pricing parameters**: Hardcoded bandwidth pricing rules that specify the cost per unit of bandwidth over different time periods (0.00014 TRX per unit before July 27, 2021, then 0.001 TRX per unit)
- **Token metadata**: Wrapped TRX contract address for consistent token identification

## 3. Step-by-step calculation

### Component A: Transaction fee calculation
- **Purpose**: Calculate the total fee paid for each individual transaction by combining all fee components
- **Logic**: For each Tron transaction, extract resource usage data including energy consumed, bandwidth used, staking rewards utilized, and direct burns. Convert receipt fee values from sun units to TRX by dividing by 1e6. Apply time-based bandwidth pricing by joining transaction timestamps with bandwidth pricing periods (0.00014 TRX per unit before July 27, 2021, then 0.001 TRX per unit). Handle cases where bandwidth usage is not directly provided by calculating it from net fees divided by 1000. Calculate the total transaction fee by summing: bandwidth costs (bandwidth staking rewards used multiplied by effective bandwidth price), energy costs (both energy staking rewards used and energy origin energy used multiplied by effective energy price), and direct burns
- **Key fields**: `receipt_info_fee` (direct burns), `receipt_gas_used` (energy consumed), `receipt_info_net_usage` (bandwidth used), `receipt_info_energy_usage` (energy from staking rewards), `receipt_info_origin_energy_usage` (energy from origin account), `receipt_effective_gas_price` (energy price per unit)

### Component B: Daily median aggregation  
- **Purpose**: Calculate the median transaction fee for each day across all transactions
- **Logic**: Group all transactions by day using timestamp truncation to daily boundaries. For each day, collect all individual transaction fee amounts calculated in Component A. Use approximate quantile calculation to find the 50th percentile (median) value, which represents the typical fee paid that day. This approach is robust to outliers and provides a representative measure of network fee levels
- **Key fields**: `block_timestamp` (for daily grouping), `fee_amount` (individual transaction fees), `transaction_fee_median` (resulting daily median)

### Component C: USD price conversion
- **Purpose**: Convert daily median fees from TRX to USD using historical exchange rates
- **Logic**: Retrieve TRX price data from two sources based on date availability. For dates from March 2, 2021 onwards, use Chainlink price feed data for the TRX/USD pair. For historical dates before March 2, 2021, use CoinGecko daily market data for Tron. Join the daily median fees with the appropriate price data by matching timestamps. Multiply the median fee amount in TRX by the TRX price in USD to get the final metric value
- **Key fields**: `timestamp` (for price lookup), `price` (TRX price in USD), `transaction_fee_median` (in TRX and USD)

### Final aggregation
- **Combining components**: The three components flow sequentially - raw transaction data feeds into individual fee calculations, which aggregate into daily medians, which then convert to USD values
- **Currency conversion**: USD conversion uses end-of-day TRX prices matched to the transaction date, with Chainlink data taking precedence for recent periods and CoinGecko filling historical gaps
- **Time aggregation**: All data aggregates to daily boundaries using timestamp truncation, ensuring consistent daily reporting periods
- **Final calculation**: The final metric represents the median transaction fee in USD that users paid on the Tron network for each day, providing a representative measure of network usage costs that accounts for Tron's multi-component fee structure

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

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Median transaction fee

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