September 11, 2026—something a little strange emerged in the world of crypto assets. “Dollars that are not USDT” entered the front door of TRON, the world’s largest USDT payment network. The one who moved in was Ethena Labs, bringing USDe and sUSDe as gifts. Anyone who has taken even a small bite of financial history should recognize this scene from somewhere. I’ll save the answer for later. First, let’s deal with the facts.
On September 11, the TRON DAO and Ethena Labs announced that USDe and sUSDe began operating on the TRON network. Users can bridge both assets to TRON through Stargate Finance, allowing them to be held and sent on the network.
Just to be clear: Stargate isn’t a door to space. It’s the name of a bridge that moves assets between chains. So what you can do today boils down to three things: bring it over, hold it, and send it. There’s nothing flashy yet. But the moment these plain three things come together is always the “beginning” in the history of financial infrastructure.
What is USDe?—the design philosophy behind “dollars without reserves”
This is the first key point. USDe is not a dollar backed by bank deposits or U.S. Treasuries like USDT. USDe is a synthetic dollar backed by delta-neutral basis trades: going long physical assets such as staked ETH, and shorting an ETH perpetual futures contract of the same amount. Price movements cancel out, and the funding rate received on the short side and the staking yield on the spot side accumulate for sUSDe stakers.
In plain terms, it’s a device that “erases price movement and leaves only the interest rate.” USDe is the core of it, while sUSDe is a version where you deposit USDe and the rewards accumulate. If you think in terms of an asset manager, it’s close to the relationship between regular savings deposits and an accumulation product. According to Ethena’s explanation, USDe is a dollar-denominated crypto asset that has grown at the fastest pace in history, backed by investors such as Fidelity, Franklin Templeton, Dragonfly, Binance Labs, Bybit, and OKX. The fact that major financial institutions are putting money into “dollars without reserves” is news on its own.
Support for major TRON DeFi such as JustLend DAO and SUN.io will be rolled out sequentially over the coming weeks, and expansion to wallets, exchanges, and payment apps is expected to follow afterward. Issuance and redemption will continue to remain on Ethereum, and providing access on TRON will be only via the bridge.
In other words, as of September 16, USDe on TRON is in a state of “you can hold it and send it, but you can’t lend it yet and you can’t grow it yet.” That said, it’s not isolated. USDe on TRON remains connected to the liquidity of other networks that Ethena supports, and USDe already supports 12 or more networks. The water pipes are connected. The faucets come next.
Putting the numbers side by side reveals the asymmetry of this partnership. TRON has more than 403 million accounts, more than 15 billion transactions, more than $94 billion in USDT, and more than $28 billion in TVL. Meanwhile, USDe is about $4.5 billion as of mid-September 2026. Roughly a 20x gap.
And Ethena isn’t an unblemished top student. USDe ballooned to more than $14 billion in 2025, taking nearly 5% of the stablecoin market, but then sharply shrank in the 2025 Q4 deleveraging. In the flash crash on October 10, 2025, the peg briefly fell as far as $0.97. The next move after getting knocked around back and forth is landing on TRON.
Then the target is obvious. Ethena wants the distribution network of 400 million accounts. TRON wants a new option: “dollars that earn yield.” Justin Sun said, “TRON is a network used by tens of millions of people every day for payments, savings, and remittances, and the introduction of USDe and sUSDe expands users’ choices and strengthens TRON as a distributed infrastructure for everyday use.” Guy Young added, “TRON users who already hold and move large amounts of dollars will be able to hold dollars where rewards accumulate on the network they already use all the time.”
Let’s put the essence in one sentence. Opening the bridge isn’t a victory—it’s just an entry ticket. As Crypto Times also points out, what this announcement shows is cross-chain availability, not evidence that TRON has generated a large amount of USDe liquidity.
Look at it in historical parallel—In 1875, the post office carried interest “after letters”
Now, the source of that déjà vu at the start. The setting is Meiji-era Japan, and the lead is the post office.
In 1871, Maekawa? actually, Maekawa no... In 1871, Maeshima? Saneatsu Maeshima? launched the postal system. It was a network to deliver letters nationwide. Then, in 1875, two financial products were added on top of that network. First, postal remittances—the function of “moving money.” Next, postal savings—the function of “growing money.” The model was a postal savings bank started in 1861 by Britain’s William Gladstone.
At the time, Japan had hardly any banks. The first National Bank was established in 1873, and branch networks were still a dream. For ordinary people, there was no “place where you could earn interest.” Yet post offices had already reached every corner of the villages. Lay interest on top of a network people were already using. This idea later produced one of the world’s largest savings institutions.
“Finance comes to the places where people already are”
Let’s layer the picture. The nationwide postal network is TRON. It’s a network used by tens of millions of people every day, with 400 million accounts. Postal remittances are USDT transfers. $94 billion worth of dollars runs across this network every day. And postal savings are sUSDe.
The lesson of history is brutally simple: it’s not that the best financial product wins. The financial product placed where people already are wins. Postal savings spread not because it was better than banks, but because the post office was already there first. The reason Ethena didn’t just settle for its own chain and refined Ethereum DeFi, and instead deliberately went straight into the main body of USDT—that comes down to this.
Most postal savings principal is guaranteed by the government. What guarantees sUSDe is nothing more than formulas, hedging, and funding rates in the futures market. If funding turns negative, the yield will thin out, and if the market breaks—as it did in October 2025—the peg can wobble temporarily. This is not “dollars that pay interest,” but “synthetic dollars that may pay interest.”
Even so, I call this move a “repetition of history.” The post office carried interest after letters. TRON is carrying interest after dollars too. A $9.4 billion main current has finally had a “waterwheel” installed. Whether it will turn or not—JustLend DAO and SUN.io will tell us in a few weeks.