Our own measurements on chain
We measured three chains in one afternoon, and the cheap coin's fee was the most expensive
On 4 September 2026 an ordinary bitcoin withdrawal cost 4.07 kroner in network fees. The same sum in USDT cost 2.48 kroner over Ethereum and 19.37 kroner over Tron. The question of whether BTC is more expensive than USDT therefore has no fixed answer.
The claim «USDT is cheaper than BTC» is common, and it is not wrong — it is merely undefined. USDT is not one chain. We measured three chains in the same afternoon to see how large the difference actually was.
What we measured, and on which day
All the figures below were read on 4 September 2026 between 12:34 and 12:37 UTC, directly from the chains themselves. The rates were taken the same afternoon: bitcoin US$79,767.61, ether US$2,453.71, TRX US$0.3233, and 9.3178 kroner to the dollar. There are no clause numbers here, because these are not contracts but chain parameters and confirmed transactions.
Bitcoin: block 965,475 contained 4,402 transactions with a median rate of 2.85 sat/vB. A withdrawal usually has one input and two outputs, and twelve such transactions in that block measured 192 vB in median. 192 vB at 2.85 sat/vB is 547 satoshi, that is 4.07 kroner.
Ethereum: block 25,903,992 contained nine pure USDT transfers, meaning transactions that went straight to the USDT contract and triggered exactly one transfer. Gas consumption ran between 41,297 and 63,221 units, with 58,421 in median. The fees ran between 1.71 and 8.67 kroner, with 2.48 kroner in median.
Tron: ten USDT transfers confirmed in the same minute used 64,285 units of energy when the recipient already held USDT at the address, and 130,285 when the address was new. The chain parameter for the energy price stood at 100 sun. That gives 6.43 TRX, that is 19.37 kroner — and 13.03 TRX, that is 39.25 kroner, to a new address.
The coin sold as the cheap one was therefore the most expensive in all three measurements.
Why the fee does not follow the amount
None of the three chains takes a percentage. Bitcoin counts per byte in the transaction, Ethereum per unit of gas and Tron per unit of energy. The size of a transfer in bytes or gas has to do with how many inputs and outputs it has, not with how many kroner it moves.
The consequence is that the fee is a fixed cost per withdrawal. Withdraw 200 kroner over Tron to a new address and 39.25 kroner goes to the network — nearly a fifth. Withdraw 200,000 kroner the same way and the same 39.25 kroner goes.
A fee that does not scale with the amount punishes frequent small withdrawals, and only those.
When does bitcoin actually become the expensive one?
The bitcoin rate swings most of the three, and we measured by how much. From 4 September 2025 to 4 September 2026 we collected 1,096 measurement points for the median rate per block. The median of them was 1 sat/vB. The 90th percentile was 2, the 99th percentile 4, and the highest single point 7 sat/vB — which occurred in a block early in October 2025.
At the highest point in the twelve-month period our withdrawal would have cost 1,344 satoshi, that is 9.99 kroner. By comparison: on the day we measured, the bitcoin withdrawal at 4.07 kroner cost more than seven of the nine USDT transfers on Ethereum. At the year's most expensive point it would have cost more than all nine.
But neither came close to the Tron figure. Even the year's peak for bitcoin, 9.99 kroner, is under half the 19.37 kroner a USDT transfer on Tron cost on a perfectly ordinary afternoon.
And here is the figure that undermines the whole question: within one single Ethereum block the fee for the same coin varied from 1.71 to 8.67 kroner — a factor of 5.07. That is a wider spread than the distance between bitcoin and the USDT median the same day, which was 1.59 kroner. The name of the chain therefore explains less than the moment does.
What the operator adds on top, and why we cannot put a figure on it
Everything above is the chain's own price. It says nothing about what the operator does with it. An operator can cover the fee itself, deduct it from the withdrawal, add a processing fee of its own, or set a minimum withdrawal that makes small payouts impossible.
We have not read a fee clause at any of the 10 operators in the comparison. Not one. The field stands empty in our data set because the clause is unread, and an empty field never means the fee is zero.
There is one more missing piece of information at all ten: which chain a USDT payout goes over. All ten list USDT among their coins, but none of our records says whether it is Ethereum, Tron or a third. The difference between the two we measured was 16.89 kroner on a single withdrawal, and that difference is settled by a piece of information that appears nowhere in what we have read.
How a crypto cashier works in other respects — two fees per round trip, and identification postponed until the withdrawal — is under when the cashier is a wallet. And the network confirming quickly is something other than the operator having released the money; that distinction is dealt with under confirmation and the processing queue.
What a figure from one day cannot promise
The measurements above apply to 4 September 2026 and to no other day. The rates on all three chains change from block to block, the exchange rates change from minute to minute, and an energy price is a parameter that can be reset.
What does hold, though, is the shape of the arithmetic: the fee is fixed per withdrawal, it depends on the chain rather than on the coin, and it is the one cost no operator in this comparison has committed to in writing as far as we have read. Which five clauses are actually compared, and what an empty field means, is under how we rank.
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