Weekly On-Chain Transaction Data Report - September 7 - 13, 2026

Overview: The Week the Cost Table Turned Over

Every dataset in this report moved this week, but the fee table's biggest change is a correction rather than a market move. Ethereum mainnet gas traded in a 0.19-0.5 gwei band - the low end of a range Etherscan's daily averages already put at roughly 0.3-2 gwei through August. Bitcoin's median fee rate sat at the 1 sat/vB relay floor it has held since June. Converted to dollars at this week's prices, a standard Bitcoin transfer costs about 11 cents and an ERC-20 stablecoin transfer between three and nine cents. TRON's rented-energy route, unchanged at about 1.37 TRX and converted at a TRX price near $0.34, costs about 47 cents - which makes TRON the most expensive of the three major rails per transfer, as it has been on the corrected numbers all along.

The float data is the counterweight. TRON's $92.28B USDT balance is still the largest of any chain and its total value on chain set a record at $144.9B. Cheaper rails on the other chains did not, this week, move the money.

1. Network Activity

Activity prints were sparse again this week, so the reliable data points remain the ones carried in TRON's September 11 release: more than 403 million cumulative accounts, more than 15 billion cumulative transactions, over $94B of USDT circulating on the chain and TVL above $28B. The most recent active-address reading remains 3.88 million in 24 hours as of September 1. Ethereum's structure is unchanged: roughly 400,000 mainnet wallets per day against more than 3.2 million on Layer-2s, with about 35.55% of ETH supply staked and exchange reserves near a 2026 low around 14.92M ETH.

2. Stablecoin Settlement

Supply kept growing at roughly half a percent a week. On the stablecoin-only perimeter the market read about $305.4B on September 10, up $1.69B or 0.56% over seven days and 1.6% over 30 days. USDT held roughly $183.4B (60% of that perimeter) and USDC about $74.5B, taking the top two to 84.4%. Below them USDe grew fastest, about 13% over the month.

The wider DefiLlama universe, which counts 423 assets including tokenised Treasury funds, read $311.15B on September 6 - so the same market measured two ways differs by roughly $6B. I quote both because the gap is a definition, not a disagreement.

Two framing notes. Stablecoin supply is not a demand signal on its own - it measures nominal dollars issued, and Block Scholes attributes part of Ethereum's decline to a yield product unwinding rather than to users leaving. And the top-2 concentration figure is rising, which matters more for corridor planning than the headline total does.

3. USDT on TRON

TRON's USDT balance remains the largest of any chain: $92.28B on September 6 against Ethereum's $73.43B, a lead of roughly $18.9B. Within USDT the chain split reads TRON 51%, Ethereum 41%, BSC 5%, Solana 2%. Which chain leads has changed hands more than once on the issuers' own numbers, and TRON DAO's July release acknowledged as much - so the lead is the reading, not a permanent fact.

The flow side is the more useful number this week: $166B of stablecoin transfer volume on TRON for the week ending September 3, and a record $144.9B of total value on chain as of September 4. On a combined USDT-plus-USDC basis - which is where USDC's $47.42B Ethereum balance rebalances the picture - Ethereum still leads with $121.11B against TRON's $91.77B out of a $257.19B, 136-chain settlement base. Those combined figures are the September 2 reading, which is why TRON's combined number sits slightly below its September 6 USDT-only balance in the table.

4. Fees and Gas

This is the week's structural story, told in two parts: a floor that holds, and a baseline that gets corrected. Bitcoin's median fee rate has been pinned at 1 sat/vB - the minimum most nodes relay - for three months: across 1,105 block observations from June 9 to September 9, 90.4% came in at or below 2 sat/vB and none exceeded 7 sat/vB. At 141 vB for a standard transfer, that is about 11 cents. Ethereum's mainnet gas traded in a 0.19-0.5 gwei band, the bottom of a range that Etherscan's daily averages show was already roughly 0.3-2 gwei through August and 1.65 gwei a year ago - cheap for months and cheaper still this week, with one early-September reading printing 0.186 gwei. One correction to the archive: our previous editions printed an overstated August gas range (8-12 gwei) for Ethereum, and the affected figures have been corrected across the site (see the methodology notes).

The practical consequence is a ranking change. TRON is the most expensive of the three major rails per transfer this week, before any USD-to-USD comparison of the destination liquidity. What TRON keeps is the TRX-denominated stability: 1.37 TRX of rented tron energy per transfer has not moved in weeks.

One number sits outside the table because it dwarfs it: exchange withdrawal fees on TRC-20 and ERC-20 withdrawals still commonly run $1-5, which is five to fifty times any chain cost on this page. A user moving funds off an exchange is paying the exchange, not the network, and nothing in this week's data changed that.

5. Large Transfers and Whale Activity

As in recent weeks, the largest identifiable movements were incident-related rather than commercial. I separate them, because counting recovery and laundering flows as settlement demand overstates real activity.

6. Exchange Flows

Exchange-level flow prints stayed thin this week, so I am not publishing a directional claim from them. The two verified structural readings are Ethereum exchange reserves near a 2026 low around 14.92M ETH, which is a supply-tightness signal rather than a cost signal, and the persistent spread between network fees and exchange withdrawal fees noted above.

7. Staking and Energy Market

Both staking bases held. On TRON, more than 60% of supply remains staked for energy and bandwidth, which is what keeps the tron energy rental market deep enough to clear at a narrow price band; JustLend's SBM market stood at $3.38B of TVL on September 1 and its sTRX liquid-staking product at more than 9.73 billion TRX across 17,000-plus addresses. On Ethereum, about 35.55% of supply is staked.

The tron energy rental price itself is the number that matters for transfer cost: cheapest observed rental sits in the low-20s of sun per energy unit, which is 1.37 TRX for a 65,000-unit transfer. Burning instead costs 100 sun per unit, or 6.5 TRX - roughly 4.7x the rented price, all week, in TRX terms.

8. Anomaly Scan

Six items cleared the threshold this week, the highest count of the quarter, and all six sit in the security and infrastructure category rather than in fee or issuance data.

The pattern worth naming: three of the six involve a bridge or a reserve system reporting one thing while the underlying state said another. Bridge accounting is this quarter's weakest link, and it is a larger risk to payment corridors than fee levels are.

9. What the Data Says About the Trend

Three readings, taken together, describe a market where cost has stopped being the differentiator and depth has not yet changed hands.

1. The fee floor is now a regime, not an event: Bitcoin at 1 sat/vB for three months and Ethereum gas at a fraction of a gwei mean the marginal transfer on any major rail costs cents or less. When every rail is effectively free at the transfer level, fee differences stop explaining routing.
2. Float has not followed fees. TRON still holds the largest USDT balance and added roughly $7.3B of stablecoin float since April, on Block Scholes' measure, largely from payments activity. Ethereum's decline over the same period is mostly a yield-product unwind, not a fee-driven migration.
3. What remains expensive is everything around the transfer: exchange withdrawal fees at $1-5, bridge and slippage legs on cross-chain routes, and the local-currency last mile, which still takes up to two business days on some corridors.

10. Outlook for Next Week

1. Whether the fee floor holds through another quiet week, and whether that starts showing up as a routing preference in chain-level volume.
2. Whether Liquid's bridge resumes operations and whether the remaining 598.5 BTC moves.
3. Whether TRON's dollar cost (about $0.47) or its fee-abstraction products do more to hold payment flow.
4. Whether supply growth stays near 0.5% a week, and whether USDe's roughly 13% monthly growth continues toward a larger role on TRON.
5. Whether any issuer responds publicly to the MAS consultation closing October 16 and the GENIUS Act comment window.

11. Methodology Notes

1. Stablecoin supply is quoted on two perimeters: a stablecoin-only count ($305.4B, Sep 10) and DefiLlama's 423-asset universe including tokenised Treasury funds ($311.15B, Sep 6). The roughly $6B gap is the tokenised-fund segment.
2. Bitcoin fees use the median fee rate, not the mean or the maximum, because a small number of urgent transactions distorts averages. A standard SegWit transfer is modelled at 141 vB (one input, two outputs).
3. Ethereum transfer costs assume 21,000 gas for a native transfer and 65,000 gas for an ERC-20 transfer, priced at the week's gas readings and ETH price.
4. TRON costs assume 65,000 energy for a standard USDT transfer and roughly 131,000 for a first transfer to a new address, priced at the cheapest observed rental rate and at the burn rate respectively.
5. Fee baselines, and two corrections: earlier working baselines on this site overstated typical costs on both chains - 8-15 sat/vB for Bitcoin and 8-15 gwei, later printed as 8-12 gwei, for Ethereum mainnet, with transfer costs derived from them. The verified record differs on both chains: Bitcoin's median fee has been pinned at 1 sat/vB since June 9 (CryptoTicker's 1,105-block series and dated mempool.space readings through August), and Ethereum mainnet gas averaged roughly 0.3-2 gwei through August on Etherscan's daily series (1.65 gwei a year ago), pressing to 0.19-0.5 gwei this week with a 0.186 gwei low reading on September 4. Every affected figure has been corrected across the site, including the earlier August editions' Bitcoin average-fee rows, their Ethereum gas rows, and the August monthly report's Bitcoin section. Readers comparing editions should treat both the Bitcoin and the Ethereum declines as measurement corrections; the market's genuine development this week is TRON's dollar cost sitting at the top of the table on unchanged TRX terms.
6. Estimates are labelled "est."; unverified readings are marked as reported rather than measured. Figures are as of September 13, 2026 unless dated otherwise.