It is the coin that was renamed, not the network: since 15.06.2026 it has been called GRAM instead of Toncoin, while the network itself is still TON. A block here takes about 0.4 seconds — by the measurement of 19.09.2026 that is more than seven times faster than TRON on block time.
How USDT is built differently here
On TRC20 all the bookkeeping is held by a single contract with an “address — balance” table. TON is not built that way: every holder has their own separate contract for the token, and the shared contract keeps only the description and the size of the issue. Two things follow from that. A transfer is a chain of four or five messages between contracts, not one call. And your own contract for USDT is created automatically on the first receipt, at the sender's expense.
What a transfer costs
The median across live transfers on 19.09.2026 was 0.00117 of a coin, that is $0.0016. That is 1,330 times cheaper than the same transfer on TRC20 the same day. And a first receipt of USDT into an empty address here is no dearer than an ordinary transfer, whereas on TRON it costs twice as much. One caveat is obligatory: a platform's withdrawal tariff is its own tariff, not the network fee, and in tariffs the gap between networks is no longer a thousandfold but a matter of a few times.
Less than one per cent of all USDT
By the issuer's own reporting, as of 19.09.2026 TON has 1.43 billion USDT in issue — 0.74% of the whole supply and fifth place among networks; TRON has 66 times more of it. Being cheap does not make a network the main one: the other side may simply not support it, and that has to be checked before the transfer, not after.
The issuer can freeze here too
Verified by calling the contract's methods on 19.09.2026: the shared USDT contract on TON has a working administrator, and the holder's wallet answers the status method — the blocking mechanism is in place. By the reference implementation of a contract like that, the administrator can lock a wallet, take the tokens off it and burn them, and the taking works even on a locked one. A non-custodial wallet protects you from losing access, but not from the issuer freezing the token. No public list of frozen addresses specifically on TON could be found.
More on this: Which network to choose for a USDT transfer