TRON H1 2026: DeFi upgrades and AI rollouts drive growth

TRON combined upgrades to its DeFi protocols with a series of AI product launches in the first half of 2026. Network metrics show circulating USDT on TRON exceeded $90 billion and DeFi total value locked rose above $5.18 billion by early September.

Protocol teams implemented recurring buyback-and-burn mechanics and released incremental product updates during H1. These actions were aimed at reducing token supply and increasing on-chain activity across trading, lending, oracles and storage services.

SUN.io rebranded in January and launched SunSwap V4 on March 2. The update introduced six architectural changes, including native TRX swaps and flash accounting. SunSwap V4 reached peak liquidity near $108 million and often recorded daily trading volumes above $70 million. SUN.io completed its 50th and 51st buyback-and-burn rounds in April and July and has permanently removed 678,547,188 SUN from circulation since starting the program.

JustLend DAO expanded its product set and accelerated JST buybacks. The protocol completed large-scale JST burns in January, April and July, allocating more than $70 million to buybacks during H1 and removing a cumulative 1.711 billion JST from circulation, equal to about 17.29% of total supply to date. The protocol’s SBM lending market reported a TVL of $3.38 billion as of September 1. Its GasFree transfers feature recorded 7.7 million cumulative transfers totaling $132.6 billion and reached nearly $2.9 billion in weekly volume at the end of June.

WINkLink upgraded its oracle services and announced a WIN buyback program on July 6 that directs oracle revenue to repurchases and burns. WIN’s market price rose roughly 22.5% from late June to late July following the buyback announcement. The project added new price feeds and a Market Statistics dashboard in March and secured several exchange listings earlier in the year.

BitTorrent resolved a multi-year regulatory case in March and resumed product and market activity. The team released BitTorrent Neo for macOS in June and launched BTTInferGrid on June 17, a decentralized AI inference marketplace that aggregates idle GPU and bandwidth resources. BitTorrent said revenue from decentralized services will fund routine BTT buybacks, and BTT gained a fiat listing on a Thai exchange to expand regional liquidity.

On the AI side, TRON rolled out a multi-layer stack. Bank of AI launched in February with payment, identity and developer modules that support TRON, Ethereum and BNB Chain. B.AI, a unified multi-model gateway launched in April, had more than 2.2 million registered users by September 1 and recorded daily token throughput above 1.1 trillion on August 31 after a free-access promotion in mid-August that added roughly 196,000 API users in two weeks. AINFT is developing benchmarking and evaluation tools for AI agent trading strategies. BTTInferGrid supports open-source models such as Qwen3.6, Qwen2.5 and Llama 3.1 8B and integrates with B.AI for one-click access to decentralized inference capacity.

TRON joined the Agentic AI Foundation at the Linux Foundation as a Gold Member in March and took part in industry standards and governance discussions. Network engagement data show about 3.88 million 24-hour active addresses during the period.

At Malaysia Blockchain Week 2026, TRON founder Justin Sun commented, “In a future financial landscape shaped by institutions, open blockchains, and AI, TRON’s infrastructure will play a central role.”