Update (March 25, 3:05 am UTC): This article has been updated to add comments from Justin Sun.
Tron DAO has scaled its artificial intelligence fund to $1 billion from $100 million, targeting investments and acquisitions of early-stage startups building core infrastructure for the agentic economy.
The billion-dollar fund, announced on Monday, will focus investments in four areas: agent identity systems, stablecoin-based payment rails, tokenized real-world assets (RWA) and developer tooling for autonomous financial systems.
The expansion is built on Tron DAO’s theses dating back to 2023, which foresees stablecoins becoming the practical medium of exchange between AI agents, stablecoins becoming the natural payment layer for “AI-augmented people,” and the rise of tokenized equity.
Blockchains race to support agentic AI
Tron is just one of many crypto-native ecosystems to expand investment into AI by targeting the agentic payment economy. Solana and Base have also made moves to expand into this nascent field; others recently include Visa, Stripe, and World.
In September, the Ethereum Foundation formally entered the agentic AI race with the launch of the “dAI Team,” which aims to make Ether the “preferred settlement and coordination layer” for AI agents and the machine economy.
However, it is a notable contrast to Tron’s approach, as Ethereum is positioning itself as a trust and coordination layer rather than a payments rail, leaning into its decentralization ethos rather than competing on speed and fees.
Tron scaling to support AI agents, Justin Sun says
Tron said its blockchain is positioned to serve the future agentic economy with 370 million user accounts, more than $21 billion in daily transaction volume, and over $85 billion in circulating USDt (USDT).
Tron founder Justin Sun previously told Cointelegraph that many AI agent use cases involve small, frequent transactions, “which require networks that are fast and inexpensive to use.”
Average confirmation times are about three seconds on Tron, compared with roughly 12 seconds on Ethereum, “making it well-suited for high-frequency transactions,” he said, citing an Arkham report.
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Sun told Cointelegraph that, “While TRON does not publish AI-agent-specific throughput metrics per se, the network is designed for sustained, high-frequency transaction workloads, which serve as a practical proxy for AI-driven activity.“
He added that the network has demonstrated the “ability to sustain large-scale, real-world transaction volumes with predictable, low-cost execution.”
“This makes it ideal for repeated, automated interactions such as treasury management, merchant settlement, API-to-API payments, and other machine-to-machine financial flows.”
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