TRON DAO has expanded its artificial intelligence fund from $100 million to $1 billion to invest in and acquire early-stage startups building core infrastructure for the emerging agentic economy. The fund will prioritize four areas: agent identity systems, stablecoin-based payment rails, tokenized real-world assets (RWA), and developer tooling for autonomous financial systems.
The expansion builds on TRON’s 2023 theses that foresee stablecoins becoming the practical medium of exchange between AI agents, the natural payment layer for “AI-augmented people,” and a rise in tokenized equity. Several crypto-native ecosystems are moving into the agentic payments space—Solana and Base among them—while traditional payments and infrastructure firms such as Visa, Stripe and World have shown interest as well.
In September, the Ethereum Foundation launched the “dAI Team,” aiming to make Ethereum a preferred settlement and coordination layer for AI agents. That approach contrasts with TRON’s emphasis on acting as a payments rail focused on speed and low fees, while Ethereum leans into trust, coordination and decentralization.
TRON notes its network already supports 370 million user accounts, over $21 billion in daily transaction volume, and more than $85 billion in circulating USDT. Founder Justin Sun has said many AI-agent use cases involve small, frequent transactions that require fast, inexpensive networks. TRON’s average confirmation time is roughly three seconds versus about 12 seconds on Ethereum, a difference proponents say suits high-frequency, machine-to-machine commerce.
Looking ahead, Sun and TRON argue the critical question is supporting a shift from a handful of AI-agent applications to mainstream machine-to-machine commerce. Infrastructure is developing to meet that need, including AINFT, an agent framework launched on TRON to help developers build and deploy autonomous agents.
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