Before 10:00 UTC on a weekday. Across 34 days of scans, the cheapest quote on our board for 65,000 energy for an hour sat at 1.30 TRX from 01:00 to 10:00 UTC, climbed through the late morning, and held at about 1.95 TRX from noon to midnight. Same energy, same rental hour, about a third cheaper by the clock.
In September, after one day of scans, we wrote that whether the time of day matters was a question for an archive weeks deep. It does.
What this is drawn from
Every quote the board read between 5 September and 13 October 2026: 3,042 scans with at least five prices in them, 19 quotes in a typical scan. Only prices a platform actually quoted are counted. One hole: our scanner was offline from 6 to 12 October, apart from a single scan on the 7th, so those days are missing rather than filled in. Every figure below is in a JSON file published next to this page.
The cheapest price, hour by hour
Median of the cheapest quote in each scan, 65k energy for one hour:
| Hours, UTC | Weekdays | Weekends |
|---|---|---|
| 00:00–00:59 | 1.76 TRX | 1.30 TRX |
| 01:00–09:59 | 1.30 TRX | 1.30 TRX |
| 10:00–10:59 | 1.43 TRX | 1.30 TRX |
| 11:00–11:59 | 1.56 TRX | 1.30 TRX |
| 12:00–15:59 | 1.95–2.02 TRX | 1.30 TRX |
| 16:00–23:59 | 1.95 TRX | 1.56 TRX |
This is not drift. On 31 of the 33 days with scans on both sides of noon, the afternoon’s cheapest quote was higher than the morning’s. Per unit of energy, it is the difference between 20 and 30 sun.
Who sets the floor
NETTS or CatFee quoted the lowest price in 92.6% of scans. NETTS was at the floor in 76.6% of scans (alone in 50.7%), CatFee in 41.9%, and the two were tied at the bottom in 25.9%. tronfor.me reached the floor in 6.0% of scans, APITRX in 1.1%, MeFree and iTRX in fewer.
Both move by the clock. CatFee’s hourly median is 1.30 TRX until 11:59 and 1.95 TRX from 12:00. NETTS sits at 1.30 overnight, steps up from 09:00 and runs between 1.95 and 2.21 TRX through the afternoon. With both of them up, the floor of the board is up. We can see the switch; we cannot see the reason for it.
Weekends stay cheap for longer
On Saturdays and Sundays the 1.30 TRX floor held until 16:00 UTC, and the evening step was to 1.56 rather than 1.95. A weekend afternoon cost what a weekday morning did.
The spread did not close
Over the 34 days, the cheapest quote had a median of 1.37 TRX, the middle platform 2.73 TRX and the dearest 4.75 TRX. The dearest quote asked a median of 3.65 times the cheapest, and between 2.4 and 4.1 times in eight scans out of ten. For 130k energy the picture is the same: the dearest quote ran 3.5 times the cheapest.
What to do with it
If you send USDT on a schedule — payouts, sweeps, an end-of-day batch — run it before 10:00 UTC on weekdays and the same energy costs about a third less. If you send when you have to, the platform matters more than the clock: over the whole period the middle of the board asked about twice the cheapest quote.
Either way, look before you pay. The lowest price on the board changed 341 times in these 34 days, so a bookmark is not a price. Right now the cheapest 65k/1h quote is 1.30 TRX at NETTS.