TRON, one of the public chains which supports smart contracts and DApps had recently released news of launching a stable coin pegged Tronix – USDT-TRON, is the rising star in Blockchain realm. Tron is similar to Ethereum, users have to access TRON’s blockchain network through crypto wallets. However, these two blockchains have some differences in terms of gas fee design. Below is an example where I will take a commonly used DEX as an example to demonstrate the difference.

TRON JOYSO, the TRON version of JOYSO exchange has additional features that everyone should know about before starting to trade. At the bottom right of JOYSO exchange, you can see a column stating current gas price, network connection, and the wallet you’re using to access the exchange. However in TRON JOYSO, only network connection and the wallet used to access are displayed. Where is the gas price? Don’t I have to pay gas fee while making transactions on TRON Network?

The secret to this zero-gas-price lies in the fundamental design of TRON. That is, Bandwidth Points and Energy. With these two resources, people are able to conduct transactions on TRON and to run smart contracts without consuming their own coins – TRX. (Most of the time)

Bandwidth Points

“Bandwidth points are the number of usable bytes for an account per day.” (The TRON Developer Hub, 2018)

The above explanation could be overwhelming for non tech savvy people, so I’ve come up with a Muggle version of explaining – Bandwidth point is the fixed quota of free transactions every day.

Crypto hodlers know that sending transaction on Ethereum always costs gas fee. Sometimes gas price can even go up to 60 GWEI during network congestion, making token trading less profitable. But now, the problem is solved on TRON. In every 24hr, TRON network allocates 5,000 Bandwidth points to each account, allowing the account owner to make transactions without paying additional fee.

However, the allocated amount of Bandwidth only supports about 25 transactions per day. If an account doesn’t possess enough Bandwidth, there are two alternatives to proceed with transactions. The first solution is, freeze your TRX. By freezing TRX, the account receives Bandwidth Point/Energy in return, enabling account owner to execute more transactions. Another way to send transaction without having Bandwidth Point is to spend around 0.7 TRX as gas fee from your account.

Energy

Energy is one of TRON’s special features. It can only be obtained through freezing TRXs similar to Bandwidth. This resource has its specific usage – creating and operating smart contracts. Energy is TRON Network’s CPU resource consumption when users are building and operating smart contracts.

According to TRON’s official document, 1 Energy represents 1 microsecond passed while executing smart contracts. So the more complicated a smart contract is, the longer it takes to operate, the more Energy consumed from an account.

Article by Hao