TRON (TRX): Polygon Opens Its Payment Stack to $93.44 Billion in USDT: What Matters Now

Polygon has opened its payment stack to TRON. Since the announcement of October 8, 2026, companies can settle a complete stablecoin payment through the Open Money Stack on the TRON chain: take in money in local currency, convert it into USDT, hold it on TRON, forward it to other chains when needed and finally pay it out again to a bank account, a card or a cash pickup point. For holders of TRON (TRX) this is not a price story but news about the chain's role in payments. Whether it turns into demand for the token hangs on a single quantity, and that one appears further down.

The price itself has barely moved. TRX trades at $0.3306, 0.4 percent below the previous day and 1.1 percent below the level of a week ago, according to CoinGecko as of Saturday morning. Market capitalisation stands at $31.4 billion, which puts it eighth.

What Polygon's Open Money Stack now settles on TRON

The Open Money Stack, or OMS, is Polygon's toolkit for firms that want to settle payments in stablecoins without building the technology themselves. Open Money Stack in one sentence: a set of ready-made building blocks for taking in, holding, forwarding and paying out stablecoins, which a company plugs into its own product via interfaces.

According to Polygon's announcement, the TRON integration covers five steps. A customer pays in by bank transfer, card, cash or crypto. The money arrives as USDT in the TRC-20 standard on TRON. There it sits in a custodial or an embedded wallet. From there the company can set when and where it flows on. At the end it goes to a bank account, a card, a cash pickup point or another wallet.

The fixed deposit address

One practical point sits in the detail: every customer receives a permanent TRON deposit address that can be reused for every further deposit. Incoming USDT is automatically matched to the right customer. A company therefore needs no new address per transaction and no reconciliation process of its own to assign incoming payments to accounts. Anyone who has tried to attribute hundreds of deposits without a payment reference to the right users will see why this point sits so near the top of the announcement.

Polygon names the Philippines, Mexico, Argentina and Nigeria as target markets, and remittance services, gig-work platforms, trading venues and fintech start-ups as target customers. Germany is explicitly absent from that list, and there is a reason for it, which appears in the MiCA section below.

USDT on TRON: $93.44 billion in circulation, 50.7 percent of all Tether dollars

Polygon justifies the move with the size of the chain, citing more than $94 billion in USDT on TRON, over half of the entire stock across all chains. We checked that figure, and it holds, but only under one of two possible readings.

According to Tether's own transparency page, 94.25 billion USDT are authorised on TRON. Of those, 0.81 billion sit in Tether's own treasury and are therefore issued but not in the market. In circulation, then, are $93.44 billion. Across all 19 chains Tether reports, circulation adds up to $184.25 billion. TRON's share therefore comes to 50.71 percent.

Ethereum, the second large rail, carries $86.05 billion in circulation and thus 46.70 percent. The gap between the two chains amounts to roughly $7.4 billion. All of the remaining 17 chains together come to less than three percent; Solana follows in third place with $2.94 billion.

This analysis was compiled by cryptoticker.io itself on October 10, 2026, on the basis of the 19 chains Tether reports on its transparency page.

Authorised, treasury, circulating: three numbers for the same stablecoin

Here lies the point at which most reports turn imprecise. For the same stablecoin on the same chain there are three different numbers, and they differ by billions.

The authorised supply is what Tether has issued on a chain. It appears as total supply in the contract on the chain and comes to 94.25 billion on TRON. The treasury holding is the part of that which sits in Tether's own wallets and has not yet been released into the market, 0.81 billion on TRON. The circulating supply is the difference, so 93.44 billion.

Calculate TRON's share against the authorised supply of all chains and you arrive at 48.68 percent, below half. Calculate it against circulating supply and it is 50.71 percent, above. Polygon's wording is accurate, but accurate only for the second calculation, and the lead over Ethereum is narrower than a statement about half makes it sound. Anyone wanting to check a figure like this has to know which of the three quantities is meant.

Two further numbers belong to the scale of the contract on TRON, and they show the breadth of use: 77.2 million addresses hold USDT on the chain, and the contract has recorded around 3.72 billion transfers so far.

Energy and bandwidth: how a TRC-20 transfer consumes TRX

Now to the quantity on which the price question hangs. A payment in USDT on TRON is not free of charge, even if it often feels that way to the user. Every transfer of a TRC-20 token consumes computing resources from the network, and those are measured in two units.

Bandwidth covers the raw data volume of a transfer. Energy covers the execution of contract code, and a USDT transfer needs precisely that, because USDT on TRON is a contract and not a native coin.

For both there are two routes. Either a user freezes TRX and is allotted bandwidth and energy on an ongoing basis, or he pays directly, in which case TRX is burned. The price for it is fixed as a network parameter: one unit of energy costs 100 SUN, that is 0.0001 TRX. The more USDT payments run over the chain, the more energy is consumed, and the more TRX is either frozen or destroyed. Therein lies the link between payment volume and token, and it is the only robust transmission channel from the one quantity to the other.

Polygon Trails: USDT from TRON to Polygon without a bridge

The second technical building block of the announcement is called Polygon Trails and forwards USDT and other supported assets between TRON and the chains of the Ethereum family in a single operation. Polygon names Polygon itself, Base, Arbitrum, Avalanche and Optimism among the destinations.

The difference from the previous route is that the user does not operate a bridge. A bridge is a contract that locks assets on one chain and issues an equivalent on another; bridges were for years among the largest single items in the sector's loss statistics. With Trails the service handles the forwarding in the background.

Polygon cites as an example an operation in which 100 USDT from TRON arrive as 99.98 USDC on Polygon. The difference of two cents is the price for forwarding and conversion in that example. That is a figure from the provider and not a value we measured; what a real operation costs depends on size, destination chain and load.

MiCA and USDT: stablecoin trading in Germany after July 1, 2026

Now the part that counts if you hold the token in Germany. As large as USDT is on TRON worldwide, the framework here is that narrow. Tether has not applied for authorisation of USDT as an e-money token under the European MiCA regulation. With the final expiry of the transition period on July 1, 2026, USDT has therefore all but disappeared from MiCA-regulated trading venues in the EU; the large houses had already halted trading for EU customers in the months before.

What this means in practice can be put in three points, and none of them is a ban on you personally:

• On a platform regulated in Germany you will as a rule no longer be able to buy or sell USDT. Which providers still carry which stablecoins is worth a look in the crypto exchange overview, because the pairs differ from house to house.
• Holding USDT in your own wallet and transferring it between your own addresses remains permitted. The restriction is addressed to regulated platforms, not to private ownership.
• As a substitute on regulated platforms, USDC and EURC have established themselves, their issuers holding European authorisation.

For the Polygon announcement this means: the target markets Polygon names lie outside the EU, and that is no coincidence. A German merchant who wants to accept payments in stablecoins ends up, as things stand, with an authorised euro or dollar token, not with USDT. If you want to spend crypto in everyday life, the route here runs more readily via a crypto credit card that settles in euros in the background.

TRX price at $0.3306: 23 percent below the 2024 all-time high

The token itself has not reacted to the news so far. TRX stands at $0.3306 and thus 0.4 percent below the previous day. Over seven days that works out to a loss of 1.1 percent. Circulating supply stands at 94.99 billion TRX, and the distance to the all-time high of $0.4313 of December 3, 2024 comes to 23.3 percent.

What is remarkable is less the direction than the narrowness. The daily values of the past week ranged between $0.3306 and $0.3361. That is 1.7 percent between the highest and the lowest value, in a week in which the broader market swung considerably more and ether gave up around seven percent over seven days.

What has changed since the DeFi Summer start on October 4

On October 3 we reported here on the start of the third round of DeFi Summer on TRON: 60 days of running time, $2 million in rewards for TRX, USDD, JST and SUN, and a price that had at the time been moving within a six percent range for a month.

A week later it can be said what the campaign has done to the price, and the answer is: nothing measurable. Since October 4 the daily value has fallen from $0.3354 to $0.3306, a loss of 1.4 percent. The range has not widened but narrowed, from six percent over the month to 1.7 percent in this week. A rewards programme worth $2 million has therefore not lifted the token out of its track, and that is the sober yardstick against which the payments news now has to measure up as well.

What is new is that TRON now carries two stories at once: a time-limited incentive programme on one side, a permanent integration into an outside payment stack on the other. The second works more slowly, but it does not expire after 60 days.

Levels above and below: $0.3361 as the week's highest value

The levels follow from the week itself and from round numbers, not from a price target. Above, the highest daily value of the week sits at $0.3361, a good 1.7 percent above the current level. Beyond that, $0.35 begins the next round level, which repeatedly formed the ceiling in September.

Below, the current level sits at the lower edge of the week itself. The next round level beneath it is $0.32, around 3.2 percent away. Both are observation points for the question of whether the narrow range holds, and not an expectation that they will be reached.

Custody, leverage and holding period: what to check as a German holder

Four points that apply irrespective of the price and that you can look up yourself.

Route to purchase and authorisation

TRX itself is unaffected by the MiCA question surrounding USDT and is tradable on regulated platforms in Germany. With the provider, what counts is whether it holds authorisation under MiCA and how it handles deposits and withdrawals in euros. Fee models differ considerably between a flat charge per order and a percentage mark-up; with small amounts that decides the outcome more than the price on the day of purchase.

Custody

Anyone holding TRX or USDT for the long term should know the difference between custody at the provider and a wallet of their own. With self-custody, responsibility for the recovery phrase lies entirely with you, and a lost phrase cannot be replaced. Which devices are suitable differs above all in the way the recovery phrase is secured. For TRON there is also this: you need energy for your own transfers. A wallet without any TRX cannot pay for a USDT transfer, even with USDT sitting in it.

Leverage and liquidation

TRX is also traded as a futures contract with leverage. With a token that moves 1.7 percent in a week, only high leverage produces meaningful amounts, and that same leverage means a small countermove closes the position. Work with twenty-fold leverage and a five percent countermove leaves you, arithmetically, at zero, before funding costs.

Holding period and tax

In Germany the one-year holding period under Section 23 of the Income Tax Act continues to apply to crypto assets held privately: after one year a disposal gain is tax-free, before that it counts as a private disposal. Since January 2026 providers have been reporting data to the Federal Central Tax Office; the first submission for the 2026 reporting year is due in 2027. This reporting duty changes nothing about the tax rules themselves, it only changes what the tax authorities know anyway. This is not tax advice; in case of doubt a tax adviser settles it.

Our assessment: payment volume is not yet TRX demand

In the newsroom's view, the announcement matters more for TRON as a network than for TRX as a token, at least for now. Three verifiable points speak for it, and one against.

In favour: with $93.44 billion in circulation TRON is the largest USDT rail, and the integration into an outside payment stack tends to cement that position rather than erode it. In favour too: the integration is not time-limited, unlike the rewards programme of October 4. And in favour: with energy there exists a genuine transmission channel from payment volume to token demand, not merely a narrative pattern.

Against it speaks the order of magnitude. Polygon's OMS targets remittance services and fintech start-ups in the Philippines, Mexico, Argentina and Nigeria. How many of them adopt the toolkit is open, and Polygon gives neither a number nor a timetable for it. As long as the number of transactions over the chain does not visibly rise, energy consumption does not rise either, and without that the news remains a report about the chain's role and not one about the price. The week since the DeFi Summer start shows how little an incentive alone moves the price.

What can be checked is consumption itself: if transfers of the USDT contract on TRON climb clearly beyond the 3.72 billion recorded so far in the coming weeks, the thesis can be substantiated. If they stay flat, it is refuted. This is an assessment of the situation and not a recommendation to buy or sell; with crypto assets a total loss is possible.

TRON as a payment rail: no TRX boost without more energy consumption

Three steps that follow from this week:

1. Establish which stablecoin you can trade at all. USDT has been all but unbuyable on regulated platforms in Germany since July 1, 2026; USDC and EURC are not. Which pairs your provider carries and what they cost is shown in the crypto exchange overview.
2. Look at your TRON wallet for energy. If USDT sits there but no TRX, you cannot move anything. Anyone holding larger amounts in self-custody should also look at the hardware for it; the hardware wallet comparison offers a starting point.
3. Watch consumption, not the headline. Whether the Polygon integration turns into demand for TRX shows up in the number of transfers on the chain, not in the announcement. If you want to use crypto in everyday life, the crypto credit card remains the more workable route in Germany for the time being.

(As of October 10, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)