Exchange on Tron

A Tron address starts with a capital T and is 34 characters long, encoded in Base58Check; letter case matters. The same address in hex starts with 41 — block explorers and APIs sometimes show it that way, while wallets and exchanges use the T form. Tron tokens come in two standards: TRC20, which are smart contracts (USDT is one), and the older TRC10, built into the protocol itself.

Fees on Tron are counted in resources: bandwidth and energy. Every transaction needs bandwidth, and each account gets a small amount free every day — usually enough for plain TRX transfers. Energy is spent by any smart contract call, which means every TRC20 transfer. Without energy of your own (earned by staking TRX or rented), the network burns TRX from the sender's balance to cover it. Sending a token to an address that has never held it takes roughly twice as much energy.

Hence the most common situation: USDT TRC20 arrive in a new wallet and cannot be sent because it holds no TRX. A new address is also inactive: the account appears on chain only after its first incoming TRX or TRC10 transfer, and the sender pays 1 TRX to create it. Receiving TRC20 does not activate an address. Some wallets can take the USDT fee out of the transfer itself (the GasFree service), but a regular wallet needs TRX for it.

A Tron block comes every 3 seconds. It becomes irreversible (solidified) once 19 of the 27 Super Representatives have built blocks on top of it — about a minute. A transfer to a personal wallet needs no memo.

A frequent trap is address poisoning. A wallet receives a tiny transfer from an address whose first and last characters match one from your history, in the hope that you will copy it from there next time. Check the recipient address in full, character by character.