The Digital Wave of Future Currency and Assets: Reshaping the Internet of Value Era

"Future currency is digital currency, future assets are digital assets." This judgment accurately captures the core trend of the global value system transformation. With technological iteration, the form of currency is shifting from physical to digital, and the category of assets is also breaking through physical boundaries, accelerating the formation of a new financial ecosystem centered on the 'Internet of Value.'

1. Future Currency: A Hybrid Pattern Dominated by Digital Currency

Future currency is not a single form, but a hybrid model with 'central bank digital currency (CBDC)' as the main body and cryptocurrencies as a supplement, together forming the payment and value storage system of the digital age.

(1) Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC): Digital Upgrade of Fiat Currency

CBDC is a digital fiat currency issued by central banks. While it has no physical form, it has the same legal tender status as paper money and is pegged 1:1 to existing currency units (such as digital yuan). Its core position as future currency stems from four major advantages:

- Efficiency and Low Cost: Significantly improve payment clearing efficiency, reducing cross-border payment time from several days to seconds, with costs lowered by over 90%.
- Financial Inclusion: No bank account is needed; only a mobile phone is required for use, allowing billions of unbanked people worldwide to access the formal financial system.
- Precision of Monetary Policy: Central banks can track the flow of money in real time, implementing measures like 'targeted rate cuts' and 'precise subsidies,' even directly distributing funds to those in need.
- Security and Compliance: Funds can be traced throughout the process, effectively combating money laundering, terrorist financing, and other criminal activities, maintaining the stability of the financial system.

Currently, over 100 countries worldwide are advancing CBDC development, with China's digital yuan already covering consumption, government affairs, and other scenarios. The Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank are also accelerating pilot programs, solidifying CBDC's mainstream position.

(2) Cryptocurrency: A Decentralized Supplement

Cryptocurrencies represented by Bitcoin and Ethereum are decentralized currency experiments based on blockchain technology, issued without any centralized institution, yet becoming important supplements to future currency due to their unique properties:

- Decentralization and Anti-Censorship: Not relying on governments or banks, asset ownership is entirely controlled by users, avoiding risks from failures or policy changes of a single institution.
- Globalization and Permissionless: Anyone can participate in transactions as long as they have internet access, breaking down cross-border financial barriers to achieve 'global payments without borders.'
- Transparency and Programmability: Transaction rules are fixed through code, ledgers are publicly verifiable, and smart contracts are supported, providing 'fuel' for new ecosystems like Web3.

In the future, cryptocurrencies are more likely to play the role of 'digital gold' (value storage) or specific ecosystem tokens, complementing rather than replacing CBDCs.

2. Future Assets: Digital Assets Restructuring Value Boundaries

Digital assets are assets whose ownership exists in digital form, encompassing far more than currency, including both 'digitization of traditional assets' and 'native digital assets,' completely breaking the liquidity and investment threshold restrictions of physical assets.

(1) Tokenization of Traditional Assets: Digital Twins of Physical Assets

Tokenization is the mapping of traditional assets like stocks, real estate, and artworks onto the blockchain, transforming them into divisible and tradable digital tokens.

- Financial Assets: Stocks, bonds, and funds can achieve 24/7 trading, with clearing times reduced from T+2 to instantaneous completion, greatly enhancing market efficiency.
- Physical Assets: A valuable painting worth 100 million yuan can be tokenized into 100 million shares, allowing ordinary people to own 1/100 million of it for just 1 yuan, and can be traded on the secondary market at any time, completely revitalizing high-value idle assets.

(2) Native Digital Assets: A New Form of Value Without Physical Correspondence

Native digital assets are inherently digital, with no physical counterparts, yet they can create entirely new value scenarios:

- NFT (Non-Fungible Tokens): Represents ownership of unique digital items, such as digital artworks, virtual land in games, digital certificates, etc. In 2021, Beeple's digital artwork (Everydays: The First 5000 Days) was sold for 69.34 million dollars, proving the value of native digital assets.
- Data Assets: Personal health data and consumption behavior data can be certified through blockchain in the future, controlled and traded by individuals, allowing 'data sovereignty to return to users.'
- Digital Identity and Reputation: A user's credit record and reputation accumulated from social behaviors online can become a digital asset used in scenarios such as lending and cooperation, achieving 'reputation as an asset.'

3. Technological Foundation: Three Major Technologies Driving Digital Transformation

The development of digital currency and digital assets relies on the integration of three major technologies: blockchain, artificial intelligence (AI), and the Internet of Things (IoT):

- Blockchain: Provides a decentralized trust mechanism, ensuring that the ownership of digital assets is immutable and traceable, while the smart contract function can enable automatic execution of asset transactions, serving as the 'infrastructure' for the circulation of digital assets.
- AI: Can analyze massive on-chain data and user behavior, supporting digital asset pricing and risk assessment, while also providing personalized asset allocation suggestions.
- IoT: Connects the physical world and the digital world, using sensors to collect real-time status of physical assets (e.g., wine, industrial parts), ensuring that their digital tokens fully match the physical state, solving the authenticity problem of 'digital twins.'

4. Challenges and Reflections: Unresolved Issues in the Digital Wave

Despite the broad prospects of digital currencies and digital assets, there are still four major core challenges:

- Regulation and Law: There is an inherent conflict between decentralized digital assets and centralized regulatory systems. How to formulate cross-country and cross-domain regulatory rules to protect consumer rights remains a global challenge.
- Security and Privacy: Although blockchain has anti-tampering properties, exchanges, wallets, and other aspects are still vulnerable to hacker attacks. At the same time, balancing the traceability of funds with user privacy protection requires breakthroughs in technology and systems.
- Technical Bottlenecks: Current blockchain scalability is insufficient (e.g., Bitcoin can only process 7 transactions per second), and energy consumption is high (e.g., Bitcoin mining consumes more electricity annually than some countries), which needs to be addressed through technological innovations (e.g., Layer 2, PoS mechanisms).
- Digital Divide: Some regions lack internet infrastructure, and groups such as the elderly have low acceptance of digital technologies. Without intervention, this may lead to a 'new inequality in the era of digital assets.'

5. Conclusion: Entering a New Era of the Internet of Value

"Future currency is digital currency, future assets are digital assets." Essentially, this is a digital revolution of the value system. Just as the internet has achieved the global free flow of information, blockchain and digital technologies are enabling 'value' to break through geographical and form limitations, achieving efficient global circulation.

In the future, we will live in the era of the 'Internet of Value': payments will require no waiting, assets can be easily divided, ordinary people can easily invest in high-value global assets, and data and reputation can also be transformed into wealth. This transformation will not only reshape finance and commerce but will also profoundly impact art, social interactions, and even social governance, opening a new chapter in human value exchange.