Tron (TRX) exchange rate: how did the price of one of the most used blockchain platforms change?
Tron (TRX) cryptocurrency release, first crypto boom, and crypto winter (2017 - 2020)
Tron cryptocurrency appeared on exchanges in September 2017 — just before the most active phase of the first large-scale crypto boom, which went to the advantage of its investors. In just three months after listing on crypto exchanges, the price of TRX cryptocurrency grew more than 100 times — $0.002 to its all-time high (ATH) at $0.22, which has been maintained until now.
The low transaction fees associated with stablecoins such as USDT played an important role in popularizing the Tron ecosystem. To this day, Tron is still one of the most used blockchain platforms among the owners of the most popular stablecoins.
However, after a brief but rapid rally that lasted until January 2018, the quotes of almost all cryptocurrencies began to decline rapidly, and the Tron exchange rate was no exception. First, the price of TRX dropped to $0.03 in March 2018 and then to $0.012 in December of the same year.
Then, unlike many other altcoins, the price of the Tron cryptocurrency rose until June 2019, when it reached a local high of $0.038. This was mainly due to the popularity of the Tron ecosystem for stablecoin transfers, which kept demand for the TRX cryptocurrency needed to pay for transactions high.
Following a local uptrend, TRX quotes began to decline again and reached $0.013 by January 2020. After a brief rise to $0.22, the price of the Tron cryptocurrency collapsed again in March 2020 to a two-year low of $0.009.
The DeFi boom and a new massive crypto rally (2020 - 2021)
From 2020 to 2021, Tron was one of the top five most extensive decentralized finance (DeFi) ecosystems and saw rapid growth. If in July 2020, the amount blocked in the DeFi protocols (TVL) of the Tron ecosystem was $17.3 million, by April 2021, this figure grew to $4.4 billion, more than 250 times.
Most of the liquidity came from the JustLend lending platform, on which users can borrow cryptocurrency and earn income by lending digital assets to other users.
The TRX cryptocurrency rate also showed significant growth: from March to September 2020, the price of Tron increased more than 3 times from $0.009 to $0.03. And in April 2021, the value of TRX reached a three-year high of $0.16 amid the general growing trend in the crypto market. Moreover, the growth of TRX was so rapid that for a while, Tron overtook Binance Coin (BNB) and even Tether (USDT) in terms of capitalization, taking the third line in the ranking of CoinMarketCap. However, Tron cryptocurrency failed to update the price maximum, even despite the high demand for this asset.
In just three months, the TRX cryptocurrency rate corrected more than 2.5 times, falling to $0.06 by July 2021 and then rising again to $0.11 in November of the same year, when the leading cryptocurrency, Bitcoin, updated its ATH.
A prolonged correction and a new growth phase (2022 - 2024)
After a prolonged crypto rally, another correction period came in 2021, and cryptocurrency quotes started to decline again. From November 2021 to November 2022, the price of TRX cryptocurrency fell more than 2 times to $0.05. Strangely enough, the collapse of the Terra ecosystem in May 2022, which negatively affected many DeFi platforms, did not significantly impact Tron cryptocurrency quotes.
Moreover, the Tron ecosystem continued to strengthen its position in the DeFi market; from May to June 2022, its TVL grew rapidly from $3.7 billion to $6 billion. In July of the same year, Tron surpassed Binance Smart Chain (BSC) by this indicator, becoming the second-largest ecosystem in the DeFi market after Ethereum. DeFi Llama's September 2024 data shows that the Tron ecosystem accounts for more than 10% of all DeFi sector liquidity.
Since November 2022, the TRX cryptocurrency exchange rate has resumed growth despite the ongoing correction in the crypto market. One of the possible reasons for Tron's growth, while many other cryptocurrencies showed a negative trend, was the increased DeFi activity and the number of transactions with stablecoins due to ever-increasing fees in the Ethereum network. These assumptions are confirmed by Token Terminal data, according to which the number of daily users in the Tron network grew to 1.2 million by September 2023. In September 2024, it already amounted to about 2.1 million.
Moreover, TRX became one of the few cryptocurrencies on the market that continued its growth despite the summer correction in 2024: since the beginning of 2023, the price of Tron cryptocurrency has grown almost threefold, and as of September 2024, it amounted to $0.15, updating the three-year high, but it is still twice lower compared to the level of ATH.
One reason for the growth amidst the general correction of the crypto market was the launch of SunPump, a meme tokenization platform similar to Pump.fun for the Solana ecosystem. The SunPump platform quickly became popular, as indicated by the increased activity of daily users in the Tron network: on some days, their number reached 2.6 million.
Seven years after its launch, Tron remains one of the largest and most used ecosystems in the crypto industry. In comparison, Ethereum has a much smaller number of daily active users, only about 360 thousand — this is almost six times less than Tron.
At the same time, Ethereum's number has declined after a series of unsuccessful drops (free token giveaways for network activity) in 2024, even though the cost of commissions has dropped significantly, while Tron's number of active users continues to grow.
