TRON DAO Joins Cornell Tech Conference on CeFi-DeFi Integration

TRON DAO attended the Programmable Economy: AI & Blockchain Redefining Markets conference at Cornell Tech in New York on April 24. Community spokesperson Sam Elfarra participated in a session titled “CeFi & DeFi Markets.” The session was moderated by Max Tang of Cornell Blockchain and included David Gan of Inception Capital, Ayesha Kiani of Monarq Asset Management and Alex Weseley of Artemis Analytics.

The conference was co-hosted by Cornell Blockchain, Blockchain Builders, Blockchain at Cornell Tech and the Cornell Tech AI Society. Organizers reported more than 1,000 attendees from the fields of artificial intelligence, blockchain, finance and government.

Panelists discussed how infrastructure and market design affect liquidity, access and capital formation across traditional finance and decentralized finance. Elfarra commented, “DeFi is no longer a parallel system; it is slowly integrating as part of the same financial fabric that institutions operate within.” He added that networks able to support both centralized and decentralized use cases reliably will influence future market activity.

Elfarra pointed to TRON’s focus on high-throughput, low-cost settlement for stablecoins as an example of infrastructure used by multiple market participants. He said the network’s transaction capacity and settlement efficiency are being used to handle stablecoin flows at scale and to support everyday payments.

TRON described its TRON Academy program as an effort to connect blockchain education with industry applications. The organization listed a university network that includes Cornell, Columbia, Harvard, Imperial College London, Yale, MIT, Princeton, Dartmouth, the University of California, Berkeley, Oxford and Cambridge.

TRON provided background noting the project was founded in September 2017 by Justin Sun and launched its MainNet in May 2018. In April 2026 TRON reported holding the largest circulating supply of USD Tether (USDT) at more than $86 billion, about 378 million total user accounts, over 13 billion transactions and roughly $27 billion in total value locked, citing data from TRONSCAN.

Speakers at the conference also discussed intersections between AI and blockchain and how those intersections could affect market structure and capital flows. TRON said its participation aimed to engage students, researchers and developers as the industry tests new settlement rails and financial primitives.