In the digital asset economy, there has never been more activity than in 2025. Stablecoins became the backbone of this new financial paradigm, with dollar-pegged versions leading the market. Tether (USDT) has been at the forefront of this revolution, along with its indisputable heavyweight champion of a network, TRON. The TRON blockchain, designed for scalability and cheap transaction fees, has grown into the default place for world USDT to settle, with the volume of transactions far greater than the competition. It is the superhighway for digital dollars, the main artery through which value flows for millions of individuals users, high-frequency traders and global corporations alike.
But for all the highway's market dominance, it's a paradoxically complex tollway of confusing fees, with added worries about volatility and frustrating entry barriers. And while TRON wears the crown for the most popular digital dollar on earth, the experience of actually using that dollar is sometimes a confusing and costly nightmare, particularly for new users. This friction is not a small headache; it is a problem at the very bedrock of the TRON network architecture — an eternally reappearing one too, which hinders mass adoption and easy support process for prohibitively burdensome businesses and does not create a pleasant user experience for millions of potential and global users.
The Core Issue: Story of Two Confusing Resources
As we know, a single fee (in ETH) pays for everything on the Ethereum network, making the gas model very straightforward, TRON has a different approach where users are forced to deal with two completely independent resources: Bandwidth and Energy. Gaining an understanding of this dual-resource system is the first, and frequently the most challenging, obstacle for any TRON user. Like you bought a car, but it wanted you to fuel up in two different kinds of fuel from two different stations that cannot be interchanged to fill the car up to make it run.
Bandwidth: Each transaction on the network also uses this resource, which is the transaction size in bytes. The way we like to think about it is the amount of space your transaction data represents inside a block. All TRON accounts get a limited daily free Bandwidth point allowance, which should normally cover a few TRX-native (simple) transfers daily. But this free allowance disappears fast for more complicated interactions with your smart contract — e.g., if you want to transfer some USDT — and will not be possible to repeat consecutive calls for free.
Energy: This is the most important and also the most difficult to get resource. Energy is a measure of the amount of computation, in terms of TRON Virtual Machine (TVM), that is needed to run a smart contract. USDT on TRON is a TRC-20 token (which is a type of smart contract). Every USDT transfer consumes a lot of Energy. One big point of confusion is that it is not all the same for almost everone as far as my Energy cost. When you transfer USDT to a wallet address that has never held USDT before, it takes around double the Energy as it would for a transfer to an address that has held USDT before as the network has to do additional computational work to setup a new token account for the receiving wallet.
The catch is here — you get a daily trickle of Bandwidth but Energy costs money. In order to obtain it, a user must either "freeze" (stake) enough of TRON's native token, the TRX cryptocurrency, or allow the network to "burn" their available TRX to pay a price. If the user does not have enough STAKED TRX or LIQUID TRX (balance is less than 0), the transaction will just revert.
Almost all of the users do not even bother freezing TRX. It takes up significant capital and locks up capital for days — not a good solution for anyone who just wants to pay! For the majority, this leaves no choice but to burn TRX — itself a volatile and unpredictable mechanism. There is no fixed TRX price, as this will vary with network congestion and current generation costs for energy. On one day a USDT transfer could cost $1.60, a day later the same transfer could cost more than $3.20 during peak times, leaving the user without any explicable warning, which goes against TRON's reputation of a cheap network.
And thus this system creates a classic phenomenon of Catch-22 for the most common breed of new user, namely, the one whose first time receiving USDT directly to their wallet/container, is now interacting with this system. This might display a balance of hundreds or thousands of dollars in USDT, but they are basically frozen in place. They have the value but they do not have the super special one-of-a-kind and open-ended currency necessary to pay the computational tax to the network. This leads to a convoluted and complex multi-step process which is ironically the opposite of the simplicity that digital payments should provide.
Payment Story — Frustrating Path to Failure of a New User
Now, consider a graphic designer that works freelance in the field and just dipped their toe into the world of cryptocurrency, they have completed their very first job and have just received $500 from their new client in USDT sent to their new TRON wallet. They get turned on by the pace and the promise of a digital currency.
The designer has a bill to pay, so he tries to send $100 worth of his USDT. Since they carry a $500 balance it should be easy. They carefully type in the address of the recipient, the amount, click send and see a cryptic error message: "TRANSACTION FAILED: OUT_OF_ENERGY." Their funds are effectively frozen. You don't get a helpful tooltip - just a broken state.
- The "Aha!" moment. Confused and somewhat nervous, they hop on the web and end up in a vortex of forum threads and blog posts on the ins-and-outs of Energy, Bandwidth and TRX. To their horror, they find that unlocking the USDT that they already had requires an entirely different token, TRX. There was certainly no indication in the wallet interface to signal that to them.
- Visiting an exchange. Now they have to leave the comfort of their wallet and go to a centralized exchange — a whole other platform entirely. Which means they are required to sign up for the service — possibly undergo another round of identity verification — and link a bank account. That in itself can take hours to days.
- Compulsory purchase & underlying costs. Next, they have to buy a small random value of TRX. How much? The guides are unclear. Maybe $5 worth? Maybe $10? They buy it and pay a small percentage on the exchange as a trading fee.
- Withdrawal barrier. They then must withdraw that TRX from the exchange to their own wallet paying a further fixed withdrawal fee to the exchange and sweating on the transfer getting a confirmation. They start sweating, second guessing themselves, whether they copy pasted their long wallet address properly.
- Finally there? Having gone through this tortuous, multi-step, expensive pipeline, they can finally get back to the very thing they wanted to do in the first place. Now they try to send a USDT transaction again. This time it clicks, but the taste is long rotten. What had been intended as a quick, inexpensive transaction became an hour long, exasperating ordeal that ultimately cost a good deal more.
This is not an edge case; this is what millions of new TRON are experiencing by default. This is a huge barrier to adoption, making a solution that should empower, into a logistical nightmare and users become confused, feel like they got taken advantage of and are hesitant to use the network in the future.
How We Solve This?
By abstracting that complexity away through energyless transfers. The continuous friction in the TRON ecosystem identified the financial demand for a better way as well as a clear market supply. And so, the market, as it does, reacted. Some solutions have emerged that completely abstract away the complexity of the resource model. These services, referred to as "gasless" or "energyless", are intended to abstract away that complicated Bandwidth and Energy mechanism and provide a user experience that we expect in modern showrooms.
One of the foremost illustrations of this new paradigm is the netts.io's USDT Transfer Tool. That takes us away from how we traditionally think about user journeys by fundamentally changing how they acquire or even need to hold TRX. It means, instead of making users go through the inconvenient and costly steps of acquiring of secondary token, it lets them directly and openly pay in USDT what is due as a transaction fee, directly from the funds they want to send.
Our process is as simple and secure as possible. User links their existing TronLink wallet to the netts.io. The next steps would be to head over to your favorite usdt.io interface, and enter the recipients address and the corresponding USDT Amount. The tool will then show your transparent and dynamic transaction fee based in USDT. Users then approve the transfer through a two-signature process that is non-custodial and fully secure. The first signature authorizes only the tiny USDT fee payment to the service, the second signature enables authorization to the transfer itself to pay USDT from their wallet directly to their desired destination. This two-step verification is a very important security feature. This segregation safeguards against the tool gaining access to any additional funds than what it is entitled to.
Behind the scenes, the netts.io system then immediately sends the exact amount of Energy needed for the transfer right into the wallet of the user. Now the wallet with the needed funds enters the process and the main transaction, which has been pre-signed, gets broadcast and mined successfully. Their private keys will never leave their wallet, and no funds are sent to any intermediary contract, so everything is completely secure and fully self-custodied. This beautiful solution converts the entire onboarding process, which was previously multi-step, high-friction, and painful, into a seamless connect-and-sign UX. For businesses it is possible to connect to a unique API that enables the recipient to pay the fee, meaning their customers can enjoy a completely frictionless deposit experience, which also solves the leading reason for failed crypto payments. And it finally brings simple, efficient and affordable USDT transfer as it was intended in the first place to all the TRON users.