TRON’s on-chain USDT circulation surpassed $90 billion during the first half of 2026, while total value locked across its decentralized-finance applications climbed above $5.18 billion by Sept. 1, according to network disclosures and DeFiLlama data. The figures place stablecoin transfers and lending—not the ecosystem’s newer AI products—at the center of TRON’s current on-chain activity.
DeFiLlama’s Sept. 1 data ranked TRON among the five largest public blockchain networks by total value locked, or TVL, the value of assets deposited in decentralized applications. TRON also recorded more than 3.88 million active addresses in the preceding 24 hours, nearly twice the count reported for BSC and the highest among major chains in the dataset.
The combination of large USDT balances, high daily address activity and a growing lending market gives TRON a distinct position in the stablecoin economy. Its network has long been used for low-cost USDT transfers, and the latest figures suggest that transaction activity is increasingly being connected to lending, trading and resource-management products on the chain.
lending accounts for most of TRON’s locked value
JustLend DAO remained the largest contributor to TRON’s DeFi base. DeFiLlama placed its SBM market at $3.38 billion in TVL as of Sept. 1, ranking it fourth among decentralized lending protocols globally.
The protocol’s sTRX liquid-staking product had more than 9.73 billion TRX staked across over 17,000 addresses, according to JustLend DAO’s published figures. Liquid staking allows users to stake TRX while receiving a tokenized position that can potentially be used elsewhere in DeFi, rather than leaving the underlying asset fully locked.
JustLend also reported more than 80,000 users for its Energy Rental service. On TRON, users need bandwidth and energy to conduct different types of transactions, and the service offers access to those resources without requiring users to acquire or burn TRX themselves.
A “Buy Energy” function launched in August was estimated by the project to reduce costs by as much as 64% compared with burning TRX for resources. Separately, the GasFree payment mechanism expanded to USDD in August after supporting USDT. GasFree allows a transfer’s network fee to be deducted in the asset being sent, reducing the need for users to hold TRX solely for transaction costs.
CryptoQuant’s second-quarter TRON report recorded $2.9 billion in GasFree stablecoin transfers during the final week of June, following a weekly high of $3 billion in early May. By Sept. 1, GasFree had processed more than 7.70 million transactions and $132.6 billion in cumulative stablecoin transfer volume, while users had saved more than $8.48 million in fees, according to product data.
sunswap v4 adds trading features as liquidity grows
SUN.io launched SunSwap V4 on March 2 with changes designed to expand the flexibility of its decentralized exchange. The upgrade introduced singleton pool management, direct TRX swaps without wrapping the token, unified settlement, customizable accounting, position notifications and “Hooks,” which allow developers to add tailored rules to pools.
Within five months, SUN.io said the new product reached a liquidity peak of $108 million and a daily trading-volume peak above $70 million. By Sept. 1, the platform reported about $650 million in TVL, more than 26,500 liquidity pools and more than $514 million in trading volume over the prior seven days. It recorded over 112,000 trades during the same period.
Those figures show that liquidity remains fragmented across thousands of pools, a common feature of decentralized exchange systems that support long-tail assets alongside major trading pairs. High pool counts can widen token availability, though liquidity depth varies substantially between pairs.
SUN.io has also continued a token buyback-and-burn program begun in December 2021. As of Sept. 1, the protocol had completed 51 consecutive burn rounds and destroyed a cumulative 678.55 million SUN tokens, according to its disclosures. Starting with the 50th round on April 25, revenue from the SunX derivatives business was added to funding from SunSwap V2 fees and SunPump income.
revenue-funded burns spread across TRON applications
Several TRON-based projects introduced or expanded mechanisms that allocate business revenue toward token repurchases and burns. Such programs reduce token supply when executed, although their market impact depends on the revenue generated, the value of tokens acquired and broader trading conditions.
JustLend DAO reported cumulative net revenue above $94.20 million and said funds directed toward JST buybacks and burns were approaching $105 million. After excluding a $10.39 million historical USDJ stability-fee component, the protocol attributed nearly $94 million to ordinary operating revenue and said about $10.34 million was reserved for a subsequent burn.
The project reported three major JST burn rounds in 2026 and referenced a fourth completed on July 17. The January, April and July rounds destroyed about 525 million, 271 million and 355 million JST, respectively. Across four rounds, JustLend DAO reported 1.711 billion JST destroyed, equivalent to about 17.29% of total supply, with more than $94.62 million in cumulative burn funding.
BitTorrent announced on July 6 that it would allocate all revenue from its decentralized business lines to a quarterly BTT repurchase pool. WINkLink, TRON’s oracle service, unveiled a comparable plan the same day, committing oracle-service revenue to WIN buybacks and publishing burn figures around the middle of the following quarter.
ai initiatives add a separate growth experiment
TRON’s AI activity expanded during the same period, though these products remain smaller and less established than its stablecoin and lending operations. BitTorrent introduced BTTInferGrid on June 17 as a decentralized physical infrastructure, or DePIN, network intended to supply computing capacity for AI inference—the process of running trained AI models.
The ecosystem also launched Bank of AI in February and B.AI in April. B.AI reported more than 2.20 million registered users as of Sept. 1, alongside a single-day token throughput above 1.1 trillion on Aug. 31. Over the preceding 14 days, the platform reported 6.86 trillion in cumulative throughput and more than 196,000 new API users.
TRON joined the Linux Foundation-hosted Agentic AI Council as a gold member in March, alongside organizations including OpenAI, Anthropic, Circle and JPMorgan. The affiliation connects TRON with an industry group focused on standards and development around AI agents, although the network’s reported on-chain financial activity remains far larger than its disclosed AI product metrics.
TRON also said the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission agreed on March 6 to withdraw charges against Justin Sun, the TRON Foundation and the BitTorrent Foundation, closing a dispute that had lasted roughly three years. The resolution removes a prominent legal overhang from the ecosystem’s public narrative as its DeFi applications rely increasingly on fee income, lending demand and stablecoin transaction volume.
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