TRON is Moving Trillions: Sam Elfarra Keynote at KBW2025

lead of Tron. Please welcome him with a big round of applause. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

All right. I think you guys can hear me. I should have a presentation up. The monitor here isn't working, so I'm going to be turning a little bit, but first I want to give a big shout out to Korea Blockchain Week for giving us the opportunity to sponsor. The exhibitors have been amazing so far as well.

So, let's have a good time and enjoy the rest of the week. So, we're going to be going into the Tron ecosystem a little bit. We're going to be discussing kind of the metrics of what makes up the Tron ecosystem, the architecture behind it, and then kind of scale into the broader payments application space. So, to start things off, the Tron blockchain is a layer one protocol. We've been around since 2017-2018-ish.

And we have a little over 327 million users across the globe. In terms of total transfer volume, it has exceeded $21 trillion. We're averaging around per quarter 3 trillion a quarter, I would say, in terms of transfer volume, which is exceeding in some years Visa, which just really points to the amount of activity in on-chain dominance that is occurring. While they continue to to fix it here, I think we should be good. But nonetheless, that's a little bit about the user activity and the transfer volume.

You can see here we've had global distribution of our nodes for as long as I could remember, with a lot of it spanning from the United States, the EU, and then going more into obviously the APAC region. You can see here our fabulous super representatives. For you guys who aren't aware, again, the Tron network is a delegated proof of stake consensus mechanism. So, the way that works is if you hold the native utility token, which in this case is TRX, and you actually freeze it or stake it, you get voting rights. And what you can do with those voting rights is you can actually vote for super representatives.

So, in this case, one of the top super representatives would be a Google Cloud, Nansen, OKX, Binance, HTX, and then Kiln. You know, we're very close with a lot of these partners and want to continue to to work with them to really bring the mass adoption of blockchain technology. And then moving on to the next slide, you can see our quarterly revenue in Q2 of 2025 nearly hit a billion dollars. Now, this is protocol revenue. So, every transaction that occurs on the Tron network, a portion of it, the gas fee in itself, goes towards burning the utility token TRX, which continued to generate the economic value of the protocol itself.

And just in the past quarter, you know, Q2, Q3 numbers, of course, we're not there yet. It's not over. Hopefully in the next week or two. But we almost got to almost a billion, so that's a 21% quarter-over-quarter increase. Again, really pointing to the significance of the Tron network as a payment platform or payment protocol, I should say.

Now, let's get into our stablecoin dominance. So, the numbers fluctuate a little bit. I believe we're at around 48-49% in terms of USDT activity, but about 30% of all stablecoin supply, and again, it could be fluctuating like 1 or 2%, is on the Tron network. So, $82 billion worth of stablecoins across USDT and various other stablecoins are on the Tron network, which really points to how Tron has become one of the default networks for payments, for stablecoin transactions, etc. I'm sure plenty of people in this room have sent somebody something using digital assets on Tron, whether you're sending money to your family members, or you're trying to conduct business, or you're trying to, you know, pay one of your employees.

It really points to the dominance that blockchain technology is starting to have. And now you can see here, according to Artemis data, the transfer volume. So, stablecoin transfer volume just takes the aggregate amounts of actual activity that happens in value. So, for example, if one transaction is $10, you're just adding up the actual value that's being accrued. Since July 2025, we've had about $650 billion in stablecoin transfer volume.

So, earlier, we've exceeded 21 trillion since our lifetime. So, since the lifespan of the Tron network, we have exceeded $21 trillion in value that has been accrued or or sent across our blockchain. And since July of 2025, a little over 650 billion. And this is a really important metric that I wanted to point out, thanks to the the friends at Thanks to our friends at the CryptoQuant team. As you can see by this chart, it's really specifically focusing on USDT on Tron in terms of the transaction count by value cohort.

So, what that means is, as you can see by this number, a little less than or around 60% of all transactions that occur on Tron are utilizing $1,000 or less. So, on average, 60% of the transactions that occur on Tron up until August of this year, over the past, I believe, couple of years, has been $1,000 or less, which really point to the retail adoption of payments not just on Tron, but across the broader Web3 industry, which, you know, we'll get into a little bit into the case studies as to why we're seeing this adoption. Now, we have an innovative resource model. The way this really works is if you stake your TRX, or you can rent it out, you get energy or bandwidth. You can use that to offset your gas fees completely.

So, lots of really innovative merchants or PSPs, payment terminals, etc., will hold a good amount of the native utility token, stake it or rent it for energy, offset their gas fees completely, further creating a proper user experience for their users. And these are some boring numbers about how much activity we do in that case. If you want me to gloat, we can gloat, but we can we can skip on that. And now, in terms of the settlement protocol as a whole, we average about 3 million daily active users on a day-to-day basis.

Our daily transaction counts averages around 9.3 million per day. And we're continuously seeing that grow in the right direction. And here's a little bit more about our top three TVLs. So, governance lending and then collateralized debt positions, or CDPs, excuse me, are really where we're seeing a lot of our TVL come from.

And this is a little bit about our ecosystem. This only makes up a very, very small amount. We actually have a larger, larger ecosystem, but of course, we can't fit it all in one page for the time being. Now, I want to get into a little bit more about the impact of global payments, and not just focusing on Tron, but actually focusing on why we're seeing payments starting to transition into the Web3 industry. So, the first half of this speech was me really just showing off the Tron network, really looking into how amazing we've been, really due to a lot of the people who use it, a lot of the innovative developers that are building on Tron, and of course, our team.

But now I want to touch up a little bit about why payments are being adopted using Web3 technology. So, to start off, cross-border remittances, I think we all know instant settlement time and lower transaction fees are much better than high fees and waiting 3 to 5 days just to send a $10 transaction to your mom or your aunt who really needs the money. The second thing is the e-commerce integration aspect of it. Because of very successful developers, very, very innovative ones, intelligent ones that we probably have plenty of here in this room, being able to create software development kits, SDKs, APIs, etc., that are available on these blockchain networks, make it easier for merchants to then integrate those those applications.

And then the next thing is, of course, the enablement of fast, secure, and global transactions. That in itself is what's causing a lot of that adoption of not not just the Tron network, but but various other aspects of Web3 technology. So, why should businesses use stablecoins? Again, we'll start with the lower transaction costs. Imagine having to send somebody overseas $100, but instead of them getting it right away, you have to pay $5 on top of that $100, essentially losing a lot of value that could be accrued.

Now, to larger individuals, that may not seem like a lot, especially if it's only a $100 transaction. But what if it's a thousand? What if it's 10,000? What if it's in like a war-torn area where it's a high risk for banks to hold those funds? What if it's in areas where they don't have solvent liquidity?

That all gets into the larger aspect of the fees starting to actually pile up. And that's also where the delays essentially happen. And we see this a lot in the United States, even with a robust banking infrastructure, it still takes some times to settle funds. It still has a lack of liquidity in some cases, which then cause those economic discrepancies or recessions, in other words. And then, of course, borderless transactions.

Of course, ensuring that everything is compliant. We're not saying to do anything bad. To that point, the Tron network, or I should say the Tron DAO, we spun up an organization with Tether and TRM Labs, and Binance recently joined it, called T3FCU, where it's a financial crime unit, where it's solely dedicated to working with global law enforcement to reducing illicit activity on chain, which I think is extremely important, and we can all agree on that being the next frontier that we have to overcome in order for blockchain to really become much more adopted. So, I'm very proud to say that the Tron team is one of, if not the only blockchain that's actually working with global law enforcement within this type of an organization. And we're hoping to see many more as Binance is starting to follow suit.

Now, of Of there's the security and transparency aspect of it, which I mentioned earlier. You know, with by using stablecoins, you can essentially reduce fraud and have more real-time visibility. Um which a lot of people tend to think otherwise. They really tend to think that using stablecoins actually invites illicit activity, which is not the case. Now, how can businesses accept stablecoin payments?

What's the actual rudimentary brass tacks of how it works? It's very simple. A lot of payment processors or or direct direct wallet payments allow that instant integration into your platform. Uh there are obviously the display of stablecoin payment options where you can either pay in USDT or you can pay with another stablecoin on Tron. Um and now a lot of PSPs are allowing it where you can use any other cryptocurrency as long as it meets a certain liquidity requirement.

Um to then process the said transaction. And you can settle the transaction in any crypto that you want. Um again, that's dependent on the PSP and that really is dependent on what blockchain it's obviously using on, but uh with the Tron network, we're seeing a lot of that type of innovative technology. So, imagine accepting, for example, Bitcoin, um you know, from a customer. You don't want to manually take that Bitcoin, sell it, send it to USDT on Tron, and then hold it.

There's a lot of slippage and fees that go into that. In this case, with the PSPs, they're actually taking the native asset, whether it's Bitcoin, and it automatically transfers into the stablecoin. So, these types of innovative technologies are what's causing a lot of mass adoption. Um so, then there's obviously that processing of transactions, then converting that to fiat or holding stablecoins, giving the the uh the client or the business or the merchant that's benefiting from blockchain technology that choice is extremely important. And then ensuring compliance and accountability to make sure no one's doing anything shady and we're following, whether you're in the US, AML and KYC laws, um etc.

And making sure again, we're staying on the compliant side. Now, this is my favorite slide and I know I took a while to get to it, but this is a really, really important one. Um So, when we look at the entire continent of Africa or at least specifically sub-Saharan Africa, I I believe it was the year 2023 or 2022, across that year, intra or across intra-Africa trade of sub-sub-Saharan African countries, about 20 of them, they transferred about 90 to 95 billion dollars in funds across that trade. Of that amount, nearly 10 billion dollars was taken or eaten up by bank fees or some sort of transferring fees by the middleman. So, this is these are businesses in Africa that are trying to conduct trade with their fellow countries um in the sub-Saharan region and they're getting um you know, eaten up by fees, nearly 11%.

So, 90 billion dollars in value and about 10 billion dollars annually is eaten up by fees. And you know what a great solution is to that? Doing the trading or the fee structuring on the Tron network or any blockchain network uh for that case. Because comparing 10 billion dollars lost in fees to 10 dollars lost in fees is a huge, huge leap in value add that this type of technology brings to businesses, to to moms, to dads, to parents, to kids. And this type of money can help circulate economies to actually scale much more properly.

Um and in regions like in Africa where they have a lack of uh financial infrastructure due to hyperinflation, uh due to limited banking laws or at least interoperability between the countries themselves, that's why the fees tend to be so high because of that that lack of infrastructure. Blockchain technology is that alternative infrastructure. It is that alternative solution that's allowing people to essentially bank themselves. It's allowing businesses to be able to actually open up their business to other countries across the world and it allows them not to lose out on time and on costs. And that in itself is the real value add of blockchain technology.

Tron does it very well. We see a lot of our users not just in APAC, but we see a lot of them in Africa. Think Nigeria. And we see a lot of them in Latin America. Think uh Colombia or El Salvador um or Brazil, where people are essentially banking themselves on we see in a compliant manner uh using the Tron network.

And businesses themselves are adopting that as well. Um so, that's a a beautiful case study that I love to point to because again, it's it's really sad that uh people in in businesses in Africa are losing out so much on those fees. Um and then of course, uh you know, as I mentioned, stablecoins could be that solution or it has been that solution. It's probably the the best product market fit there has been in crypto next to events. Obviously, us being here is a custom to that or attribute to that.

Um and then borderless finance, it enables that that structure of efficient trade and economic growth across the continent of Africa. And we're hoping to see more of that in Latin America. We're hoping to see more payment activity occur on chain. And you know, we hope to see that the future of finance really does happen on chain. I know it's a cliché thing to say.

And I know a lot of us keep saying, you know, the future is still coming or we're still so early, but we are starting to hit that inflection point of seeing that mass adoption occur of blockchain technology. Um and all of this really points to Tron, um you know, being that future of business payments where we see more businesses starting to conduct um activity using stablecoins either on Tron or other networks, of course. Um but with Tron's near-zero fees, instant settlement, it makes it one of the best for developers to build applications that they can offer to their clients. Um so, that businesses in regions like Africa, Latin America, the Middle East, APAC, um can save billions and give it back to their users or back to the people there to be able to grow their economies. Um so, that's what the future of hopefully business payments look like and um I hope from the very beginning of the presentation, you guys can really understand how Tron is moving trillions and we really are empowering billions of people across the globe.

So, thank you all for your time. Thank you very much, Sam. Thank you for your insightful keynote. Thank you.