Every week we answer the same five questions — about networks, exchanges, stablecoins, costs, and the week ahead — so that regular readers can scan a fixed structure instead of relearning a new format. This week's edition covers October 5 – 11, 2026: the week a compromised hardware-wallet reseller drained more than 300 wallets of an estimated $72–$94.5 million, most of it USDT on TRON, and Tether's freeze authority took centre stage twice in the same forty-eight hours.
🖥️1. Networks: TRON idle on cost, and bigger on settlement
Nothing moved on TRON's cost side for an eighth straight week: the burn price is still 100 SUN, the best surveyed OTC rental price is still 26 SUN, block times held near 3 seconds, and no governance vote touched a resource parameter. TRX closed the week at $0.3299, down 1.7% — a move large enough to show up in the table and small enough that it changed the network cost of a standard transfer by about a cent. It was the weakest weekly close since the last week of September.
The settlement numbers kept growing. USDT supply on TRON passed $94.25 billion this week, up $18.67 billion — 24.7% — year over year, against a network page showing more than 408 million accounts, about $28.16 billion in total value locked and over 15.8 billion cumulative transactions. The third-quarter stablecoin report from the RWA Foundation and Token Terminal, with data as of October 1, put TRON's stablecoin market capitalisation at $93.9 billion: roughly 60% of everything the top ten chains added in the quarter, while Ethereum shed $4.9 billion.
Institutional housekeeping continued at the edges: Tron Inc. added 147,789 TRX at an average $0.3383 to push past 717.6 million TRX held, JST began trading on Uphold, and TRON DAO was title sponsor at TOKEN2049 Singapore and Blockworks' DAS Asia, where Justin Sun said end-to-end post-quantum signature support has been deployed on the Nile testnet with mainnet activation targeted for the end of 2026.
Bottom line: the rail got larger and slightly cheaper to use in dollar terms this week. Neither fact required a decision from anyone.
🏢2. Exchanges: the calm week, and why the risk story moved elsewhere
The venues were quiet, in the good way. All eleven exchanges we track held their USDT TRC20 fees, all were fully operational, and Bitget completed a clean week after its October 2 restoration, so the status flag we carried through the incident has been retired. The only interruptions were token- and chain-specific: AXS withdrawals on BSC at Bitget, SEI deposits and withdrawals at MEXC for the Sei upgrade, an hour of BTC wallet maintenance at Bybit, and a 48-hour withdrawal pause at BitMEX for an infrastructure upgrade starting October 12.
The risk moved to the device. Ledger confirmed on October 9 that it is investigating fund losses among customers who bought hardware from CryptoBilis, an authorised Southeast Asian reseller. Estimates of the damage run from $72 million to $94.5 million across more than 300 wallets, with most of the value in USDT on TRON. Ledger asked the reseller to pause sales and shipments, told buyers from the last 90 days not to initialise unused devices, and advised users who had already configured one to move assets to a device with a fresh recovery phrase.
Two dated exits got closer. Extended's migration to Arc requires USDT and wBTC balances above $1 in sub-accounts to be converted or withdrawn by October 21, 12:00 UTC, with deposits and withdrawals paused for up to about two hours during the switch. Blast's interface deadline is October 26, after which only L1 bridge contracts work. And the Mt. Gox trustee's repayment completion date falls on October 31, with about 34,500 BTC — roughly $2.9 billion — still undistributed as of October 5 and roughly 4,500 claims unresolved.
Bottom line: no venue-level withdrawal failure anywhere in the week. The losses came from self-custody infrastructure, which is a different risk with a different fix.
💵3. Stablecoins: $305.8 billion, and a week of freeze decisions
Dollar stablecoin supply held near $305.8 billion on October 11 in the fiat-reserve-plus-synthetic tally — $272.7 billion in qualifying fiat-reserve float plus $33.1 billion in crypto-collateralised and synthetic designs — with USDT at $184.1 billion and USDC at $73.0 billion. Tallies that classify those coins differently run up to about $10 billion higher. The category remains below the May record of roughly $320 billion, and the growth this month has been flat.
Tether's freeze authority was exercised twice in forty-eight hours, in opposite directions. In the Ledger reseller drain, Tether froze approximately $10 million in USDT — and the attacker responded by swapping balances into USDD through SUN.io and the USDD peg stability module, moving outside the issuer's reach. On October 9, Tether restricted four THORChain vaults on TRON holding about $1.45 million and released them roughly two hours later, leaving 19 other addresses from the same action blacklisted.
One number puts both events in proportion: the USDT float on TRON is now $94.25 billion, up $18.67 billion over the past year. The $10 million freeze is about 0.01% of that float, and the THORChain release about 0.0015% of it.
Bottom line: the issuer can act fast and precisely, and it can only act on its own token. If your exposure is USDT, that helps you; if it is BTC or a different issuer's dollar token, this week offered no recovery path at all.
💰4. Costs: the eighth flat week, and the widest gap between the two energy quotes
No fee changed at any of the eleven tracked venues for an eighth consecutive week. The $1 floor holds at six of them, the market average is 1.5 USDT, and Kraken's 2.5 USDT remains the ceiling — with Kraken's ERC20 route the most expensive complete path at $8–$20+ once gas is counted.
Energy held at 100 SUN to burn and 26 SUN to rent at the best surveyed venue, a 74% saving. At TRX's $0.3299 weekly close: about $2.14 burned, $0.56 rented, about $1.12 rented to a fresh address (roughly $4.29 burned). The weekly all-in saving for a withdrawal-plus-transfer cycle versus the most expensive tracked path is about $3.09, down two cents from $3.11 on a TRX price that fell 1.7%.
The number worth watching is on the other side of the market. JustLend DAO's weekly snapshot put its energy rental price at 4.089 TRX per 100,000 energy — about 41 SUN per unit — and reported it rising, after the protocol cut its base rate from 15% to 8%. The on-chain lending market is now quoting roughly 58% above the best OTC price for the same resource. We price transfers off the OTC side; the lending quote is what you pay if you rent through a DeFi protocol, and the spread is wide enough that the route you choose matters more than the week you choose.
Bottom line: ~$1.56 all-in for $1,000 from a floor venue over TRC20 with rented energy, unchanged in substance for eight weeks.
🔭5. Outlook: five dates, and one of them is a macro print
October 14 — September CPI. The last inflation reading before the Fed decides. Forecasts cluster near 3.6–3.7% headline and about 2.4% core; the October hike probability sat near 20% after the jobs report and the FOMC minutes.
October 15 — PPI and retail sales. Same morning, 08:30 ET, and the last demand-side data before the October 27–28 meeting.
October 21, 12:00 UTC — Extended's conversion deadline. USDT and wBTC above $1 in sub-accounts must be converted or withdrawn before the Arc migration; missing it restricts the account and liquidates affected positions at the mark price.
October 26 — Blast's interface deadline. After it, recovery requires direct interaction with Blast's bridge contracts on Ethereum L1.
October 31 — Mt. Gox completion date. 16:00 CET on October 30 for European creditors because of the time zone and the end of daylight saving. Roughly 34,500 BTC remains undistributed; the trustee has moved this date three times, so treat it as the current schedule rather than a guarantee.
Also on our board: whether the $681 million of Bitcoin ETF outflows extends into a second week, whether Tether reclaims any of the Ledger-drain balances that have already reached exchange deposit addresses, and CoinEx's December 22 withdrawal deadline, now 72 days out.
Nothing moved on cost this week — eighth flat fee week, third week at a 26–30 SUN energy band, TRX down 1.7% — while two things moved sharply underneath. Demand turned: $681 million left US spot Bitcoin funds and 24,073 BTC left exchanges in a single day. And the week's losses came from self-custody rather than from venues: a compromised hardware-wallet reseller drained 300+ wallets of an estimated $72–$94.5 million, mostly USDT on TRON, with Tether recovering about $10 million of it and the attacker swapping the rest into a stablecoin Tether does not control.