A common misconception is "people use Tron because it's cheap" - this is false. Rn, if I pull up the latest USDT transfers, Ethereum L1 costs $0.52 while Tron costs $1.24 (links posted in the next cast). Now, there's some nuance to this, as Tron also has a bandwidth-based system, but the cumulative fees... (contd.)

En masse though, Tron is doing ~$1.2 million/day in fees on 5 million transactions, so about $0.25/transfer. Ethereum is pretty close in fees but 1 million tx only, so about 5x cheaper to use Tron (obviously more nuace with use cases). Doesn't Tron have some sort of subsidies too? Been a while since I've looked at it.

i wish there was just better data. like a ton of trx transfer counts are free (fees paid by subsidy b/c of staking, e.g., https://tronscan.io/#/transaction/35ac3c1c8a99f3d276ea96975f854f8fd5409be7f71ec545bcf932fc3ced4e7e). something like 60% i think. this chain just confuses me.

We can't do a naïve average because a) Ethereum has a much higher mix of complex transactions - DeFi, NFTs etc. and b) Tron has a bandwidth-based system, where stuff like TRX are much lower cost. So, we just have to look at what USDT transfers actually cost.