TRON DAO expands AI fund to $1B as agentic economy race heats up

TRON DAO has scaled up its artificial intelligence fund by a factor of ten, from $100 million to $1 billion, targeting investments in 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 Ethereum 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.

_Agentic payment volume on the x402 protocol has spiked recently. Source: _Artemis

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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Regarding scaling, he said the real question is what happens if AI agents move from a handful of applications to mainstream machine-to-machine commerce.

“To support this shift, infrastructure is beginning to develop around the ecosystem,” he continued, mentioning an AI agent framework recently launched on TRON called AINFT, which is designed to help developers build and deploy autonomous agents.

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