I opened the market page these past couple of days, and the screen was covered in red. The one exception was $TRX , which looked remarkably calm.
I pulled up the data: it’s around 0.336 now, with virtually no change over the past 30 days. Meanwhile, $BTC has fallen to around 77,000, and LINK, AVAX, SUI and others are all down more than 20% over the past 30 days. Honestly, my first reaction was that it felt a little strange—in crypto, when something doesn’t fall, it actually makes you suspicious 😅
But looking closer, there’s a reason it’s holding steady.
TRX has essentially stopped looking like a “speculative coin” and has become more like a high-speed highway for USDT. According to CoinDesk’s Q3 report, around 73% of stablecoin transfers across all networks took place on Tron, and the amount of USDT on-chain peaked at around $92.7 billion. Many people use this network to exchange currencies, send cross-border payments, and deposit USDT into exchanges. The fees are paid in TRX, so the demand is genuine and driven by real need, not sentiment. The report also noted that TRX’s daily volatility in Q3 was only around 0.9%—roughly a third of BTC’s.
There’s been quite a bit of progress this month too: Polygon integrated Tron into its payment services, making it easier for businesses to move funds between bank accounts and USDT; a mandatory node upgrade was released on October 23; and TRX options launched on Blockchain.com on October 28. None of these are the kind of headline-grabbing developments that would double the price, but they all point in the same direction: moving toward becoming “payment infrastructure.”
That said, I do have a few reservations:
- It’s too dependent on a single player: USDT. In today’s Binance hot wallet incident, Tether stepped in and froze over a billion USDT. The ability to freeze funds can help in a crisis, but it also shows that money on this path ultimately depends on the issuer’s decisions.
- Governance and influence are fairly centralized, and the founder’s every move has a considerable impact on the price.
- The flip side of stability is limited upside. When the market really rebounds, it will probably underperform more volatile coins.
So I see it as a potential “anchor” in a bear market, not a moonshot. Going forward, I’ll be watching two things: whether this incident leads to a significant outflow of USDT from the chain, and whether TRX can hold around 0.33 if the broader market keeps sliding.
Would you keep a little of this kind of “low-volatility coin” in your portfolio as a hedge, or do you think going nowhere is just a waste of time? 👀
These are my personal views only and do not constitute investment advice. Investing involves risk.