Justin Sun: TRON cut down illegal trading volume with T3 financial crime unit in 2024

Justin Sun pointed out TRON’s success in tackling financial crime on its network in a post shared on X (formerly Twitter). In the past year, TRON still saw its fair share of illicit activity, but it also saw an increase in intercepting illegal funds.

Justin Sun, the founder of the network, recounted the 2024 achievements of the T3 Financial Crime Unit. He claimed the unit succeeded and maintains hopes it will continue to decrease illicit activity and recover funds in the new year.

Scammers and dark market shops often chose the network for its low costs. The initiative intercepted some of the illicit volumes on TRON by making implicated funds inaccessible. Illicit activity on the network decreased by $6B in 2024.

TRON also cooperated with Tether to track and return some of the USDT from hacks or extortion schemes.

TRON ramped up action against illicit activity

The recent 2024 report by TRM reveals threats still exist. It also presented evidence that mitigation strategies have helped to decrease illicit activity.

TRON joined the effort to remove fraud from its network in a bid to improve its reputation. The network aimed to join the 2024 boom for multiple token trends, but faced some skepticism on the real value of its assets. TRON also tried to repair its reputation before becoming a carrier for WBTC, one of the most valuable DeFi assets.

In 2024, stablecoins carried a bigger share of crypto transactions, which together exceeded $10.6 trillion, up 56% from the bear market of 2023. TRON achieved records for both transaction counts and volumes toward the end of 2024.

TRON carries a significant share of professional and whale transactions, with a big part of the volume for transactions over $100K and in the millions.

TRC-20 USDT expanded its volumes to new records toward the end of 2024. | Source: Dune Analytics

TRC-20 USDT slightly decreased its supply toward the end of 2024, down to 59.75B tokens. The network still carried over $7B liquidity in bridged assets and its native DeFi protocols, relying on the stablecoin for collaterals and general transfers.

TRON had to deal with the highest volumes of illicit activity

TRON retained legacy status as one of the chains with the highest levels of illicit activity, primarily in the form of USDT transactions. The stablecoin transfers often ended up on the Huione Guarantee market , which accepted payments in TRC-20 USDT. The token offered immediate transfers with much lower fees while being widely recognized as a payment tool in some regions.

As a result, TRON carried up to 58% of illicit volume, compared to 24% for Ethereum, and 12% for Bitcoin. Binance Smart Chain and Polygon together contributed 6% of transactions from threat actors, sanctioned locations, scams, or blacklisted addresses.

Threat actors and scammers prefer networks with low transaction fees, surplus DeFi contracts, and active stablecoins.

Around 49% of TRON’s illicit transactions involved sanctioned entities, while 32% was for blacklisted funds. Sanctioned wallets belonged to Russian individuals, and contained addresses traced to terrorism funding. This type of illicit transaction was more common, as more organizations found their way to the most active chains.

The blacklisted addresses were a key contribution to TRON’s investigations, as the threat actors were no longer capable of accessing the funds. The token freezes were part of the T3 FCU activity, combining the capabilities of TRON and Tether, Inc. The initiative intercepted a total of $132M in the first few months since its launch.

Fraud was a significant part of illicit transactions, though the activity also slowed down in 2024. Confidence scams received around $2.5B based on TRM estimates, down 58% in 2023. On the other hand, dark marketplaces resumed their activity, rising by 20% from 2023 levels.

Illegal item purchases reached $2.4B, with $600M in incoming traffic to identified illicit traders. Trading for illegal items accelerated in the past year as traders became more proactive and spread to multiple platforms, including social media and Telegram apps.

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