TRON DAO Frames DeFi-TradFi Convergence at Cornell Tech

TRON DAO took part in The Programmable Economy: AI & Blockchain Redefining Markets conference at Cornell Tech in New York City on April 24. The event drew more than 1,000 attendees from the AI, blockchain, finance and government sectors.

Sam Elfarra, TRON DAO community spokesperson, participated on a panel titled “CeFi & DeFi Markets” on the Cornell Tech Sidestage (TATA). The session was moderated by Max Tang of Cornell Blockchain. Other panelists included David Gan, founder of Inception Capital; Ayesha Kiani, chief operating officer of Monarq Asset Management; and Alex Weseley, research team lead at Artemis Analytics. Panelists examined how centralized and decentralized financial systems interact and how infrastructure factors such as settlement speed and transaction cost affect liquidity, access and capital formation.

Elfarra told attendees, ‘DeFi is no longer a parallel system; it is slowly integrating as part of the same financial fabric that institutions operate within. On TRON, we’re seeing firsthand how high-throughput and cost-efficient infrastructure for stablecoin settlement can serve both TradFi and DeFi at scale.’

TRON DAO described the appearance as part of TRON Academy, a global program that connects blockchain education with industry practice. The organization listed partner universities that include Cornell, Columbia, Harvard, Imperial College London, Yale, MIT, Princeton, Dartmouth, the University of California, Berkeley, Oxford and Cambridge.

TRON DAO was founded in September 2017 and launched its mainnet in May 2018, according to the organization. TRON has hosted large volumes of stablecoin activity; TRON DAO reported that the circulating supply of USD Tether (USDT) on TRON exceeded $86 billion until recently. As of April 2026, TRONSCAN data show more than 378 million total user accounts, over 13 billion total transactions and roughly $27 billion in total value locked.

Organizers described the conference as an effort to bring students, technologists and industry operators together to discuss practical uses and market effects of AI and blockchain.