TRON Seeks to Align SELFDESTRUCT Behavior With Ethereum EIP-6780

• TRON’s latest proposal only allows full SELFDESTRUCT removal for contracts created and eliminated within the same transaction.
• It would keep contracts intact outside same-transaction destruction and transfer balances to a target address.

TRON has proposed activating TIP-6780 on its mainnet, bringing the network’s SELFDESTRUCT behavior in line with Ethereum’s EIP-6780. TIP-6780 will apply changes already included in GreatVoyage v4.8.1 at the protocol level if approved.

Listed as Proposal 94, it limits full contract deletion to cases where a contract is created and destroyed within the same transaction. In all other cases, the contract would remain onchain, while its assets would move to the target address. The update will also set the opcode’s fixed Energy cost to 5,000.

TRON linked the proposal to its earlier deprecation path for SELFDESTRUCT, as outlined in TIP-652. The new plan moves further in that direction while keeping closer compatibility with Ethereum. 

According to the proposal, the change preserves the common pattern where a contract is created and self-destructed in a single transaction. That pattern accounts for nearly all observed SELFDESTRUCT-related internal transactions in TRON’s 2025 data sample. The network says that 957,316 out of 957,324 such transactions followed the same-transaction pattern.

This week, TRON DAO joined the Linux Foundation’s Agentic AI Foundation as a gold member and took a seat on the governing board. We reported that Circle and JPMorgan are also part of the group.

TRON’s Proposal Targets Limited Contract Deletion 

Under the proposed rules, when SELFDESTRUCT runs outside the transaction that created the contract, the current execution frame would stop immediately. However, the contract code, storage, and account would stay in place. The account’s assets, including TRX, staked TRX, and TRC10 tokens, would instead transfer to the chosen target address.

If the beneficiary is the contract itself, the assets would not be burned in such cases, and there would be no net change in the balance. By contrast, if SELFDESTRUCT occurs in the same transaction as contract creation, the behavior remains as before, including deletion of account data and balance transfer.

The proposal said a contract would count as newly created only when deployment succeeds through CREATE, CREATE2, or a similar method within the same transaction. TRON’s account activation rules will stay the same under this change.

Contracts that depend on redeployment to the same address through CREATE2 after SELFDESTRUCT would no longer work as intended unless destruction occurs in the same transaction as creation. In addition, patterns that depend on SELFDESTRUCT for account removal or asset burning will also change outside that limited case.

TRON’s published onchain analysis showed limited ecosystem exposure. Few contracts contain the SELFDESTRUCT opcode, fewer hold assets, and none in the reviewed group executed an actual SELFDESTRUCT transaction.

Previously, CNF outlined TRON’s AI push as the network introduced the onchain Bank of AI through AINFT. The system lets autonomous agents make payments, manage assets, and access DeFi with x402 payments and 8004 identities.