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 September 28 – October 4, 2026: the week Bitget's restoration calendar closed on schedule, its root-cause reports landed, and only about $1.1 million of the stolen $387.5 million turned out to be frozen.
🖥️1. Networks: a quiet week on TRON — by design, not by accident
Nothing moved on the cost side of the TRON ledger this week, and after two weeks of incident-driven coverage, quiet is the story. The burn price is still 100 SUN, block times held at ~3 seconds, no congestion pricing appeared at any point, and the Energy Index stayed in its normal 25–35 band. TRX itself closed up 0.7% at $0.3357 with its high near $0.341 landing on September 30 — the day Bitget's USDT withdrawals resumed on TRON, a plausible signature of restored outbound flow.
Two official items carried the week's institutional narrative: the TRXS ETF's Cboe closing-bell ceremony in Chicago (September 29), and TRON DAO's participation in the INTERPOL NTF covering compliance, quantum readiness and law-enforcement dialogue (October 2). Neither touches a fee parameter; both extend the distribution-and-legitimacy track that has run through every week of our coverage since the ETF launched.
Bottom line: the rail did its job and charged the same for it — the seventh consecutive week of unchanged transfer economics.
🏢2. Exchanges: one calendar held, one deadline loomed, one began
Bitget — calendar held. All four restoration dates landed as published, closing October 2. The root-cause reports (September 30) confirmed two compromised third-party security products and malicious activity dating back to August 31; the recovery ledger shows about $1.1 million frozen against $387.5 million stolen, with the protection fund refilled above $300 million from the exchange's own capital and a 131% proof-of-reserves snapshot (September 29). All eleven tracked venues are now operational.
CoinEx — withdrawal-only phase began. Spot trading ended September 29, CET was auto-repurchased at 0.005 USDT, CoinEx Smart Chain and OneSwap went offline, and non-USDT balances began external conversion. What remains is a USDT exit pipe open until December 22, 02:00 UTC, after which a 5% monthly custody fee applies to the recorded balance.
Blast — an exit deadline outside the exchange sector. The Ethereum L2 announced its shutdown October 2 with an October 26 interface deadline, then L1 bridge contracts only. Once valued near $2.3 billion with $1.1 billion in pre-launch deposits, it now cites costs exceeding revenue. The pattern — dated window, hard cutoff, technical fallback — matches the exchange shutdown playbook exactly.
MetaMask — precautionary infrastructure exit. Emergency exits from affected Ethereum validators on October 1, user wallets unaffected — further evidence that third-party tooling is the year's dominant attack surface.
💵3. Stablecoins: $312 billion, growing slowly, frozen selectively
Dollar stablecoin supply held around $312 billion on October 4, up about 0.6% on the week and still below the May 17 record of roughly $320.8 billion. USDT sits near $184 billion (about 59% of the category) and USDC near $74 billion. The modest growth while ETF demand fell roughly 10x week-over-week is the divergence worth noting: settlement float keeps expanding even when speculative flows pause — exactly the profile that supports a settlement rail like TRON.
The week also sharpened the freeze-power picture. In the Bitget affair, issuer freezes caught about $318K of the original haul and the running total has inched to ~$1.1 million; one cross-chain router converted $6.3 million of ETH to Bitcoin, another blocked $50 million-plus, and a third bounced a deposit back to its sender. Meanwhile the macro-political layer continues: investigators and Tether continue to trade claims about USDT's role in sanctioned flows (Tether says it froze nearly $550 million of Iran-linked assets during 2026), and the OCC charter lawsuit will shape who can offer regulated custody in the US.
Bottom line: the dollar float grows, the freeze mechanisms work only where an issuer or intermediary exists, and neither fact changes what a TRC20 transfer costs.
💰4. Costs: the seventh flat week — and the cheapest complete path holds at ~$1.57
No fee changed at any of the eleven tracked venues for a seventh consecutive week. The $1 floor holds at six of them (OKX, Binance, Bybit, KuCoin, Bitget, MEXC), 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: 100 SUN to burn, 26 SUN to rent at the best surveyed venue (band 26–30), a 74% saving that has now held for seven weeks. At TRX's $0.3357 weekly close: $2.18 burned, $0.57 rented, ~$1.14 rented to a fresh address ($4.37 burned). The weekly all-in saving for a withdrawal-plus-transfer cycle versus the worst tracked path is about $3.11 — a cent above last week's $3.10 purely because the energy leg converts at a TRX price that rose 0.7%.
Bottom line: the cost model needed no changes this week, and the bottom-line number — ~$1.57 all-in for $1,000 from a floor venue over TRC20 with rented energy — is unchanged.
🔭5. Outlook: four dates to plan around
October 7 — FOMC minutes. The September 16 hike's internal debate goes public; with October hike odds at 18%, the minutes matter mainly for what they say about the pause's durability.
October 13 — September CPI. The print that will confirm or break the softening-inflation narrative the jobs report started.
October 26 — Blast interface deadline. After it, recovery requires direct L1 bridge interaction. If you hold anything there, treat this as final.
October 31 — Mt. Gox repayment deadline. The long-running distribution's latest cutoff; watch for supply-pressure headlines, and for the usual lesson that a decade-old withdrawal obligation still outranks most operational urgency.
Also on our board: Bitget's first full normal week (our Status flag retires if it passes cleanly), attacker-fund movements from the Bitget theft, and CoinEx's December 22 deadline now inside a 78-day window.
The week's lesson came from three venues at three stages of the same lifecycle: Bitget restored withdrawals exactly on a published calendar, CoinEx slipped quietly into its final withdrawal-only phase, and Blast opened a 24-day exit window that closes October 26. Fees and network costs did not move anywhere — which is the point: availability, not price, remains where withdrawal risk actually lives.