TRON DAO has increased its artificial intelligence investment fund tenfold, growing it from $100 million to $1 billion to back and acquire early-stage teams building infrastructure for an emerging agentic economy. The enlarged fund will concentrate on four priority areas: agent identity systems, stablecoin-based payment rails, tokenized real-world assets (RWA), and developer tooling for autonomous financial systems.
The move follows TRON’s 2023 theses predicting that stablecoins will become the practical medium of exchange between AI agents, the default payment layer for “AI-augmented people,” and a driver of tokenized equity. Several crypto-native platforms, including Solana and Base, are already moving into agentic payments, while traditional payments and infrastructure firms such as Visa, Stripe and World have also signaled interest.
In September, the Ethereum Foundation launched the “dAI Team,” aiming to position Ethereum as a preferred settlement and coordination layer for AI agents. TRON’s strategy differs: it is focusing on becoming a payments rail optimized for speed and low fees, while Ethereum emphasizes trust, coordination and decentralization.
TRON highlights its existing scale as a competitive advantage: roughly 370 million user accounts, more than $21 billion in daily transaction volume, and over $85 billion in circulating USDT. Founder Justin Sun has argued that many AI-agent use cases will involve frequent, small-value transactions that require fast, low-cost networks. TRON’s average confirmation time is about three seconds versus approximately 12 seconds on Ethereum, a gap proponents say makes TRON better suited to high-frequency machine-to-machine commerce.
To support broader adoption, TRON points to infrastructure such as AINFT, an agent framework launched on its network to help developers create and deploy autonomous agents. Looking forward, Sun and TRON frame the key challenge as scaling from a small number of AI-agent applications to mainstream machine-to-machine economic activity.
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