In the era of AI, electricity has become a new scarce resource. Countries that can organize electricity and computing power more cost-effectively and stably are qualified to embed their currency into the next generation of payment networks, shifting the currency anchor from oil to 'electricity'. This article is based on a piece by Charlie Liu, organized, translated, and written by TechFlow. (Background: Trump lashes out at 'wind and solar scams': the era of foolish energy is over, occupying American farmland while raising electricity prices) (Additional background: Breaking down Jensen Huang's deep thoughts: Why can AI only embrace nuclear energy? Four key points that 99% of people don't understand) Whoever can most effectively organize electricity and computation will have a greater claim to define the next generation of currency interfaces. Twenty years ago, I became fascinated with the topic of China's energy security during my high school years, which opened the door to my later career in macro investment, global payments, and cryptocurrency. In today's historical opportunity period marked by the productivity revolution brought about by AI and Crypto, it is unexpected that the story has returned to the origin of energy and electricity. The New Anchor of Currency In the era of AI, 'electricity' has become the new scarce element. Whoever can organize electricity and computing power on a larger scale, at lower costs, and more stably, will be more qualified to embed their currency into the next generation of payment networks. Stablecoins are not magic; they merely package a country's industrial chain, energy chain, and settlement chain into a programmable 'interface'. When this interface connects to power plants and data centers, the anchor of currency quietly shifts from gold and oil to kilowatt-hours. If we look at the timeline of the dollar story: the first half relied on the gold standard, the second half relied on the oil standard, and later came the 'debt standard'—the unparalleled fiscal and national debt market provided ultimate liquidity. This system cannot collapse overnight, but in this 'AI revolution in productivity and Crypto revolution in production relations' era, it is no longer the only natural option. When the anchor of currency shifts from physical assets to balance sheets, politics and timeframes will seep into pricing. Even if the market does not agree with the most pessimistic long-term narrative, another parallel pipeline is being laid. The Flywheel of Stablecoins Stablecoins are this new pipeline, moving settlement from cross-border agents and messaging systems to public networks and peer-to-peer settlements. Geopolitics makes abstract issues very concrete—when certain banks are excluded from SWIFT and when card organizations suspend services in certain markets, enterprises and sovereign entities will naturally seek 'power sources that cannot be cut off'. Here, no value judgment is made; we only discuss physical realities: if your exports can be settled on a track that others cannot cut off, your bargaining power will compound at the speed of network effects. This is also why the news of 'Renminbi stablecoins' appears to be about tokens, but at its core, it is about energy. Over the past decade, China has exported not just equipment and projects but has also turned its full-stack capabilities in power generation, transmission, storage, and data centers into replicable products under the 'electricity-computation-usage' framework. Tokens are merely the user experience of settlement; the moat lies in the real supply capabilities built up by electricity, reinforced concrete, and steel. This closed loop has already been operating in some places in a 'non-token version'. Capital expenditures for power stations come from China, equipment comes from China, operation and maintenance as well as spare parts come from China, and electricity costs are settled in Renminbi, with funds linked through Hong Kong and onshore-offshore accounts. Imagine the wall socket as a cash flow entry point, where electricity fees pass through the local distribution network and finally settle in a Renminbi account, without the need to transfer through the dollar to harvest value. Adding another layer of programmable settlement on top, stablecoins merely speed things up, making financing and risk control into code. Energy and Infrastructure Why must it be energy? Because AI has brought electricity to the center stage of currency, and with the widespread adoption of AI, training and inference have risen from mathematical problems to electricity problems. Today's data centers already consume a significant share of global electricity, while model sizes and service densities continue to rise. Major American tech companies are diving into 'clean and stable base load power': nuclear power contracts, long-term agreements, and a combination of decentralized and storage solutions. This is not ESG sentiment; it is the physical constraints of traditional energy. The ceiling of AI is determined by the generator behind the socket. Next comes an even sharper question: who can build electricity the fastest, on the largest scale, and on time and quality? Integrating wind turbines, photovoltaics, inverters, transformers, direct current transmission, phase adjustment, energy storage, cooling, and park integration, and delivering on schedule in unfamiliar geographical and regulatory environments tests industrial clusters, supply chain resilience, and engineering 'muscle memory'. Over the past decade, road, rail, hydropower, ultra-high voltage, and various park projects have continuously iterated overseas, allowing a 'power-engineering-finance' flywheel to become increasingly smooth. The most intuitive experience I had was in 2014 when I was doing macro investment at Franklin Templeton, on a business trip in Africa, where a newly built highway connected to Nairobi overnight, and the conference center in Zambia became a new local landmark. The engineering team viewed the complex terrain merely as a progress management issue. You can question funding efficiency, but it's hard to deny the ability to 'deliver on time' in complex environments, which is precisely the most scarce part of the 'power-currency' closed loop. The capital efficiency of investment may not be 'optimal' as per textbooks, but the capability is developed over the long term, which is a moat not visible on the balance sheet. Oil is certainly still on stage, especially in the Middle East—a region that embraces both crypto assets and new settlement experiments. However, the focus of energy in the next decade will increasingly shift to renewable and 'localized' clean electricity. Hydropower, wind, solar, and energy storage lock value above geography, combined with the data sovereignty requirements of various countries, local data centers and local electricity naturally form a pair: one side is electricity changing computation, and the other side is computation changing services, with settlements best following a path that does not need to traverse another country's system. The Implementation of Renminbi Stablecoins There are two very practical pathways here. The first is direct settlement for electricity. Power purchase and sale contracts are more aligned with the programmable properties of stablecoins than commodity trade—how much to generate, how much to measure, how much to pay, with full-chain dataization, currencies can follow the electric meter. Today, there are already electricity fees, maintenance fees, and financing leases priced in Renminbi, and tokenization merely allows accounts to be settled faster, financing to be more flexible, and collateral to be more combinable. The second pathway is for computing power and model service settlements. Electricity becomes 'AI output' in the data center, and enterprises and developers use stablecoins to buy API calls, model tokens, vector storage, and inference time. Many emerging market cross-border digital services have long used dollar stablecoins as a 'dollar substitute', and as supply chains and service endpoints increasingly come from China, an offshore Renminbi stablecoin becomes a convenient second choice. If this framework still seems abstract, consider a previously mocked case. In 2021, while I was responsible for global strategy at Jack Mallers' Strike, I helped El Salvador establish Bitcoin as legal tender, when the president proposed using 'volcanic geothermal' mining to turn local resources into globally liquid digital assets. The process was not perfect, but the direction was right: turning the 'geographically exclusive' natural endowments into tradable value units through energy and code. AI and stablecoins are industrializing this idea. At that time, 'mining with volcanoes' was seen as a joke; looking back today, utilizing local energy to digitize value seems more like a prototype of 'electricity-based currency'. The Flywheel of Going Overseas Returning to the main line, from oil to electricity, the key to the closed loop lies in the 'recycling' of currency. In the past, when others questioned using Renminbi to settle energy, the biggest counter-question was, 'What can you buy with the Renminbi you receive?' The traditional answer is...

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