USDT on TRON Overtakes Bitcoin as Top Payment Method on CoinsBee, Up 64% From 2025

UST on TRON now processes nearly twice as many payments as Bitcoin on CoinsBee, the Stuttgart-based gift card and voucher platform, marking the first time a stablecoin has claimed the top spot on the platform's payment rankings.

CoinsBee's official announcement, released today, confirmed that TRC-20 USDT has become the most-used onchain token and network payment option across the platform. Over the trailing 90 days, USDT on TRON's share of all CoinsBee payments grew 64% compared to the same period in 2025. Bitcoin, long the default crypto payment rail for retail platforms, now sits in second place by transaction count.

The numbers tell a straightforward story: when users need to pay for something today, price volatility is a problem. TRON's network fees run fractions of a cent, settlement clears in seconds, and the peg holds at $1.00. Bitcoin offers none of those properties at the point of sale. That's not a knock on BTC; it's a different asset serving a different function. But the gap between "store of value" and "payment medium" is widening in the data, and CoinsBee's figures are one of the cleaner data points available.

"USDT (TRC-20) on the TRON network has become the most-used onchain token and network payment option on CoinsBee."

CoinsBee official announcement, September 21, 2026

TRON's appeal in payment contexts isn't new, but it's accelerating. The network has quietly built one of the largest USDT circulation bases of any chain, driven largely by adoption in emerging markets where users want dollar-denominated stability without dollar-denominated banking infrastructure. Low fees matter enormously when a transaction is $20 or $50; a $5 gas fee on Ethereum is a 10-25% surcharge that kills the use case before it starts. TRON sidesteps that entirely.

The counterarguments deserve airtime. CoinsBee is one platform, operating in a specific niche: gift cards, vouchers, and everyday retail purchases. Its user base skews toward people who already want price certainty, which structurally favors stablecoins over volatile assets. A platform built around merchant payouts or DeFi settlement might show a completely different payment mix. There's also the question of whether the 64% year-over-year jump reflects a shift in user preference or simply a larger overall user base discovering USDT as their first crypto on-ramp. TRON's centralization critics, meanwhile, have consistent concerns about the network's governance structure that don't disappear because the payment stats look good.

That said, the directional signal is hard to dismiss. Across the industry, stablecoin payment volumes have been climbing for two years. Circle has pushed USDC into cross-border settlement corridors. Stripe re-entered crypto payments with stablecoin rails in 2024. Visa and Mastercard have both expanded stablecoin settlement pilots. CoinsBee's data lands in a context where the trend was already established; this is confirmation, not anomaly.

For traders watching payment infrastructure plays, the TRX token itself is worth monitoring alongside USDT flow data. Higher USDT transaction volume on TRON means more bandwidth usage, more fee burns, and more validator activity on the network. It doesn't guarantee TRX price appreciation, but sustained payment volume growth is a legitimate fundamental input, not just a narrative.

Bitcoin retains its dominance as collateral, as savings, and as the settlement layer that most serious capital still flows through. What it's losing, incrementally and measurably, is the payments conversation. On CoinsBee at least, that conversation now belongs to TRON.