About 3.22 TRX. That is the median a buyer paid on chain for the energy of one USDT transfer to an address that already holds USDT — a delivery of 60,000 to 70,000 energy — in the samples we took on 12–13 October 2026. Over the same span the cheapest 65k / 1 hour quote on our board had a median of 1.30 TRX: about 2.5 times less.
How we measured it
Energy rental leaves a trace on TRON. The seller delegates energy to the buyer’s address in a DelegateResourceContract, and a buyer usually pays a moment before, from the same address. We read 240 blocks through TronGrid’s public API — four three-minute slices of the chain, six hours apart, between 22:36 UTC on 12 October and 16:39 UTC on 13 October — and found 11,361 energy deliveries. For 2,956 of them (26%) the receiving address had sent a TRX or USDT payment in the 180 seconds before, worth between 5 and 150 sun per unit of energy and at least 0.3 TRX; that payment is what we call the price. Of those, 1,997 were TRX payments for 60,000–70,000 energy, the group priced below. The median gap between payment and energy was 3 seconds.
The other 74% have no visible payment — paid from a prepaid balance, from a different address, or off chain. They are left out, not guessed. Every figure here is in a JSON file next to this page, with the matching rule spelled out.
What one transfer’s energy cost
A quarter of buyers paid 2.00 TRX or less, the median paid 3.22 TRX, and a quarter paid about 5.0 TRX or more. For comparison, burning TRX for 65,000 energy at 100 sun per unit — the network’s rate since proposal #104 in August 2025 — costs 6.50 TRX, so even a buyer at the 75th percentile paid less than burning would have cost.
Buyers pay in packages
The prices are not spread evenly. Many buyers appear to buy fixed packages: a few exact amounts repeat hundreds of times. The most common ones for a single transfer:
| Energy | Paid | Per unit | Share of all TRX-paid deliveries |
|---|---|---|---|
| 65,000 | 2.00 TRX | 31 sun | 12% |
| 64,000 | 5.07 TRX | 79 sun | 12% |
| 64,000 | 4.75 TRX | 74 sun | 10% |
| 65,000 | 3.00 TRX | 46 sun | 5% |
Per unit of energy, the dearest of these common packages costs about 2.6 times the cheapest: 79 sun against 31, for the same transfer.
What the board showed over the same span
Over the same span the board ran 71 scans of 65k energy for one hour. The cheapest quote had a median of 1.30 TRX, the middle platform 2.73 TRX and the dearest 4.75 TRX. The on-chain median, 3.22 TRX, is above the middle of the board: half of these buyers paid more than the middle platform asked.
What this does not show
Which platforms these buyers used. Seller addresses on TRON carry no names, and we do not attach any. How long each rental lasted: a delegation can be for an hour or for days, while the board figure is for one hour, so some of these buyers bought a longer term. Nor do four three-minute windows describe every hour of the day: this is a sample, not a continuous record. Payments in USDT (120 of the matched deliveries up to 200,000 energy) are left out of the price figures above, and a payment that reached the seller from a different address is invisible to this method.
What to do with it
Before you rent, check the floor. The gap between a median buyer and the cheapest quote was about 1.92 TRX on one transfer; on a hundred transfers a month it is a three-figure sum in TRX. Right now the cheapest 65k / 1 hour quote on the board is 1.30 TRX at —. Prices also move by the clock: on weekdays the floor has been lowest before 10:00 UTC, as 34 days of scans showed.