TronLink is TRON's own wallet: a twelve-word recovery phrase, keys that stay on the device, one address that takes TRX and every token on the network. Ethereum and BNB are in it too, but only in the browser extension.
Why a transfer “eats” TRX
The network charges you not in money but in two resources: bandwidth for the size of the transaction, and energy for the work of the smart contract. Only the first has a free daily allowance — 600 units. Energy has no free allowance at all: you either get it by freezing TRX, or the network burns your TRX right inside the transfer. That is why the USDT stays where it is and it is the TRX balance that goes down.
Three quarters of the fee is a surcharge, not work
Measured 19.09.2026: a USDT transfer spends 64,285 units of energy, and 49,635 of them — 77.2% — are a penalty. The network runs a mechanism that makes calls to congested contracts dearer, and the USDT contract sits exactly at its ceiling: you are charged 4.4 times more than the contract's own work would have cost. In money, on that date, $2.17 instead of 49 cents. This is not a wallet's mark-up and not a platform being greedy, but a network parameter that is recalculated every six hours.
Why it ate nothing for your friend
Out of 120 transfers taken apart the same day, 99 — 82.5% — burned no energy at all. Those are platforms, services and bots with TRX frozen in advance; the full price is paid by someone with a fresh wallet. The second reason for the spread is the recipient: every fifth transfer goes to an address that has never once received USDT, and it costs twice as much — 130,285 units of energy, about $4.40 on that same date. The mechanics are simple: for a new holder the USDT contract has to open a new storage slot, and that costs roughly twice as much as changing one that already exists.
The “stake your TRX” advice and what it costs
Technically the advice is sound, but the price has to be named alongside it. To cover one USDT transfer a day, as of 19.09.2026 you had to freeze 6,754 TRX — about $2,282 — and unfreezing takes 14 days. For someone who changes USDT once a month that does not pay off. And separately: you cannot work your costs out from the energy price given in the wallet's own help pages. The article there is three years old and has not been updated since, and the price it names stopped applying back on 04.12.2022 — almost four years ago — and is three times higher than the current one.
More on this: How to check a transfer you have just sent