Crypto billionaire Justin Sun awards OpenAI $1 million that OpenAI does not want

Justin Sun, the Chinese-born crypto billionaire who founded the TRON blockchain, has launched an academic prize and awarded its first $1 million to OpenAI for work on the Navier–Stokes equations, a problem that, by OpenAI's own account and the Clay Mathematics Institute's, is not solved.

The Justin Sun Prize, announced on 16 September in a statement commissioned by TRON and carried as sponsored content, recognises 66 mathematical problems in its first round. The top award went to OpenAI for what the statement calls its "solution and formalized proof for the Existence and Smoothness of the Three-Dimensional Navier–Stokes Equations problem."

On 8 September, OpenAI said it had identified a singularity in the three-dimensional Navier–Stokes equations, with a formalisation in the Lean proof assistant, produced using a swarm of roughly 10,000 AI agents running an internal frontier model. Researchers described a result in which fluids beginning in an ordinary state reach infinite speed in finite time.

The Millennium Problem has four parts. OpenAI answered parts C and D, the versions in which an external force is applied to the fluid. Parts A and B, covering whether an unforced fluid breaks down on its own, are the version generally meant by the problem, and remain open.

OpenAI said it would not claim the $1 million prize the Clay Mathematics Institute has offered since 2000. Clay still lists the problem as active. Nature reported the work under the heading that OpenAI "claims" a breakthrough.

The Sun statement also attributes the Lean formalisation to "GPT-6 Astra," where OpenAI's account describes an agent swarm on an unnamed internal model.

The prize pays in USDT on TRON or USDC on Ethereum, carries no nomination process or credential threshold, and takes machine-verifiable proof as its standard. Its problem list includes the Riemann Hypothesis, Goldbach's Conjecture and unsolved problems left by Paul Erdős. Medals are inscribed Quod probatur, solvitur proved, then paid.

"My wealth is rooted in mathematics," Sun said in the statement. "It came from mathematics, and it will return to mathematics."

Sun's statement says he has donated more than $45 million across technology, environmental and disaster relief causes. In 2023 the US Securities and Exchange Commission sued him, the Tron Foundation, the BitTorrent Foundation and Rainberry over alleged securities fraud and the sale of unregistered securities. The SEC ended the case in March 2026, with Rainberry paying a $10 million penalty and Sun neither admitting nor denying wrongdoing.