Basics

Start here: TRON energy fundamentals

Everything in this category assumes you are new to TRON's resource model, and explains it from the ground up. TRON does not charge a simple gas fee the way some networks do. Instead it meters two separate resources — energy, which pays for smart-contract execution, and bandwidth, which pays for the size of a transaction on the network.

That distinction is the source of most early confusion. A plain TRX transfer barely touches energy, while a USDT (TRC-20) transfer is a contract call and consumes a substantial amount of it. When a wallet has no energy to spend, the network falls back to burning TRX to cover the shortfall, which is why the same transfer can cost wildly different amounts depending on nothing more than the state of your account.

The articles here cover what energy actually is, how to tell whether your wallet has any, why renting it is usually cheaper than letting the network burn TRX on your behalf, and how the one-hour rental window works in practice. Read these first if terms like delegation, freezing and staking are new to you — the comparison and fee-saving articles elsewhere on the blog assume this material.