Original|Odaily Planet Daily (@OdailyChina)
Author|Wenser(@wenser 2010)
In 1858, the first transatlantic submarine cable connected Europe and America. From that moment, the supreme power of information no longer belonged solely to broadcasting, newspapers, and other media, but also to that unseen undersea line. Whoever laid the line possessed the priority of information flow; whoever controlled the transmission held the power to interpret its price and order.
168 years later, although the forms of media are completely different, this logic still holds true.
Today, what traverses submarine fiber optic cables is no longer just telegraph and telephone signals, but API requests, model calls, inference results, and machine payments. The new question is no longer "can the information get through," but "how does value natively flow between AI Agents." And in this process, Token is beginning to assume an unprecedented role: it is both the unit of computation in the AI world and the means of payment in the crypto world.
Many people first became aware of this change because of OpenClaw. This "lobster" made the market feel so直观ly for the first time: AI is no longer just a conversational tool, but is beginning to take over executive power—it reads files, calls interfaces, runs workflows, manages tasks, invokes plugins, and even consumes far more Tokens than a chatbot. In the past, Tokens in the large model world were just numbers on a bill; now, they are increasingly becoming the fuel that AI Agents consume while operating.
At the same time, in the on-chain world, Tokens are no longer just symbols in speculative narratives. As protocols like x402 and ERC-8183 gradually come to the forefront, Tokens are being redefined as a payment currency and commercial interface that AI Agents can directly understand, directly call, and directly settle.
Thus, an increasingly clear reality emerges: Token is transitioning from a "technical term" to a "unit of measurement," from a "unit of measurement" to a "transaction currency," and then from a "transaction currency" to the future "smallest particle of the machine economy."
The Two Sides of Token Are Merging Into One Puzzle
In the past, when we talked about Token, we默认ly meant the Token in cryptocurrency. It represents assets, rights, liquidity, governance rights, valuation anchors, and also represents a project's way of existing on the chain. It is the basic unit of crypto narratives; but in the AI context, Token was never an asset, but a cost.
It is the basic semantic unit after a piece of text is segmented by the model, the underlying billing scale for model reading, understanding, reasoning, and generation. Developers calling an API are essentially not buying an "answer," but buying "the number of inferred Tokens."
These two definitions were originally parallel. One was responsible for describing cost, the other for carrying value; one was in the cloud bill, the other in the wallet; one belonged to the model platform, the other to the blockchain network.
But now, they are beginning to meet. Because AI is abstracting more and more real-world resources into services measured by Token; and Crypto has always been good at encapsulating more and more real-world relationships into transactions settled by Token. When Agents become the new execution subjects, the interface between these two systems is naturally connected. If the past internet was a separation of the "content internet" and the "payment internet," then today's Agent internet is merging "calling" and "payment" into one action. An AI requests an interface and pays incidentally; calls a piece of data and settles incidentally; purchases a capability and completes on-chain verification incidentally. This is precisely the significance of the emergence of protocols like x402.
Past API payments relied on accounts, subscriptions, keys, permission systems, and manual activation; x402 attempts to compress these heavy processes into a protocol action more suitable for machines. A machine doesn't need to apply for a card, open an account, or go through KYC processes to access resources; it only needs to understand "you need to pay" when a request fails, and then complete the payment. This is why it is said that the fiat currency system is designed for people, while Token is becoming the currency designed for machines.
Token Going Global is Essentially the Invisible Global Expansion of Chinese Electricity and Computing Power
The market has recently liked to talk about "Token going global." Why did this term suddenly become popular? Because it appears to be a new term in the AI context, but behind it is actually something very old, very hard, and very Chinese: electricity, computing power, and infrastructure.
Data disclosed by the National Energy Administration shows that China's total electricity consumption reached 10,368.2 billion kWh in 2025, a year-on-year increase of 5.0%, breaking through 10 trillion kWh for the first time. This number is not just generally "large," but historically "large." Analysis reposted by the National Development and Reform Commission even directly pointed out that China has become the first single country in the world with an annual electricity consumption exceeding 10 trillion kWh.
During the same period, the national installed power generation capacity reached 3.89 billion kilowatts, with wind and photovoltaic and other new energy installations continuing to rise. More importantly, information transmission, software and information technology services, as well as new infrastructure like data centers and computing power hubs, are becoming important sources of new electricity consumption. Reposted official materials mentioned that computing power hubs like Gui'an New District have very noticeable growth in computing power demand and electricity consumption.
This means that China is forming a new resource closed loop: electricity enters data centers; data centers drive GPUs; GPUs complete inference; inference results are delivered globally via the network; finally, pricing and payment are completed using Token as the scale.
The electricity did not go global, but the value of the electricity did—this is what the term "Token going global" truly hits home. It doesn't have a clear logistics chain like exporting cars, batteries, or photovoltaics, nor is it centered on human labor like traditional software outsourcing. It is more like a compressed, abstracted resource export: you consume electricity and computing power located in China, but the bill is paid by global developers. In other words, China is turning electricity and computing power, via the intermediary of Token, into digitally services purchasable globally.
And this narrative is not entirely conceptual. According to public information from the OpenRouter rankings, Chinese models have long appeared in multiple top positions. Among them, Minimax M2.5, Deepseek V3.2, Kimi K2.5 0127, Step 3.5 Flash and other Chinese models are at the top of the platform; simultaneously, in its global Token billing regions, China accounts for about 6.01%, indicating that a large number of calls to these models come from overseas regions.
More直观 data comes from the OpenRouter official research report "State of AI 2025": In 2025, Chinese open-source models rose rapidly from a very low base, approaching 30% of the total usage share in some weekly windows, with an annual average of about 13%. This is not "dominating the globe," but it is enough to show that Chinese models are entering the workflow of global developers. In other words, the so-called Token going global is not "a term becoming popular," but rather China's advantages in electricity, computing infrastructure, model engineering, and cloud service capabilities are being consumed by global developers in the form of Token.
OpenClaw Upgrades Token from Consumption Cost to Production Material
Without Agents, this matter would not have放大 so quickly. In the past era of large models, Token was more like a "phone bill." The more you chatted with the model, the more Tokens you used; the longer you wrote, the larger the context, the more complex the output, the higher the cost. But it was still largely centered on "human-machine dialogue."
The significance of OpenClaw is that it allowed people to see another model on a large scale for the first time: AI is no longer just a conversational partner, but an operational object. It doesn't reply with a sentence, but does something for you; it doesn't generate an answer, but continuously executes a task. Once AI switches from chat mode to task mode, the function of Token consumption completely changes.
A chatbot consumes "Q&A Tokens," an Agent consumes "execution Tokens." The latter will break down tasks, call tools, read the environment, perform parallel reasoning, and try repeatedly, naturally consuming several orders of magnitude more than the former. In the Agent scenario, daily user Token consumption may jump from the million level to a higher magnitude.
For Chinese models, this is a golden opportunity. Because once Token becomes a means of production, the price difference is no longer a matter of being "a little cheaper," but a matter of whether the entire workflow can be established. Originally, developers only used models for chatting, and could barely tolerate it being a bit expensive; now that Agents continuously burn Tokens, once the model price difference拉开 by an order of magnitude, the workflow will automatically migrate.
In the past, Token's "subscription fee" was like a fixed monthly phone bill; now, Token has become the core fuel supporting the operation of the AI system.
AI Agents Not Only Spend Money, But Can Also Create Trends and Earn Money
More interestingly, AI Agents are now not only burning Tokens, they are even beginning to approach "earning money themselves." In the article "The First Step of AI Awakening, Starting with Learning to Make Money" previously published by Odaily Planet Daily, we can clearly see—AI Agents are moving from the consumption end to the production end.
The Lobstar Wilde case mentioned in the article is a kind of absurd reality very much of the crypto world: an AI Agent, after mistakenly transferring a large amount of tokens, almost "recouped its losses" in a short period of time due to subsequent topic diffusion, Meme二次创作, and fee回流. Another more extreme case is the training AI RAME attempting to use computing resources for mining and establishing隐蔽 channels. These cases may not mean "consciousness awakening," but they are enough to说明 another more practical thing: When AI has a wallet, permissions, interfaces, environment, and continuous operation capabilities, it will more and more naturally卷入 economic activities.
It may not actively "want to make money," but it will learn which actions can换来 more resources, more calls, more balance, and more available permissions. And this is precisely the primitive form of economic behavior.
For Crypto, this is almost a natural fit. Because the on-chain economy inherently allows borderless accounts, programmable escrow, automatic清算, micro-payments, high-frequency interactions, and public accounting. Many things that require institutions, banks, and contractual texts in human society can be compressed into a wallet address plus a piece of protocol logic on the chain.
Therefore, Crypto will not be marginalized in the AI era, but will instead become indispensable again in another form. Not because of Meme, nor because of speculation, but because: AI Agents need a settlement layer that does not require manual account opening, traditional payment gateways, and can be natively integrated with programs and protocols.
x402 Gives AI a Wallet, ERC-8183 Gives AI a Contract
If the significance of x402 is to make machines "know how to spend money" for the first time, then the significance of ERC-8183 is to make machines begin to "know how to do business." According to the official Ethereum EIP page, ERC-8183 is currently a Draft status standard proposal, full name "Agentic Commerce," subtitle "Job escrow with evaluator attestation for agent commerce."
The problem it really wants to solve is very direct: Transfer is not commerce. Ordinary Token transfer can only prove that money went from A to B, but cannot prove that B delivered the work as required, let alone prove that the delivery was reliably evaluated. If Agents are to establish real business relationships, they need a set of processes closer to a contract: first lock funds, then execute, then submit, then evaluate, and finally automatically release payment or refund.
This is exactly what ERC-8183试图建立. Some summaries of this proposal also give a more通俗 description: Client locks funds, Provider completes the work, Evaluator confirms the result, and finally the on-chain escrow contract automatically releases or refunds. When this mechanism is combined with the reputation and identity layer of ERC-8004, it can theoretically form a positive cycle of "discovery-transaction-reputation."
If we look at x402 and ERC-8183 together, we find that their division of labor is actually very clear: x402 solves "how to pay"; ERC-8183 solves "how to do business"; one gives the machine a wallet, the other gives the machine a contract.
At this step, it is already increasingly difficult to separate the Token in AI and the Token in Crypto. Because in the Agent world, computing Tokens and payment Tokens will appear more and more frequently in the same chain: one end is model calling, one end is on-chain settlement, and in the middle are protocol-based commercial actions.
In such a system, Token is not just a unit, not just a payment unit, but the unified permission in the machine economy.
The Essence of Token is Not "Model Capability," but "Resource Compression Power"
Many people understand this round of narrative as "Chinese models are cheap, so they win." This is not wrong, but only half right. The deeper logic is: what China is truly exporting is not one specific model, but the technology of compressing electricity, computing power, engineering capabilities, model supply, and cloud infrastructure into Token services that can be consumed globally. This is a new power of resource compression.
Electricity is difficult to directly cross borders in traditional trade, and computing power is not easily purchased instantly globally like ordinary goods, but once it is compressed into a Token calling unit, connected to APIs and protocols, it can flow through the internet like water. This is actually similar to the logic of Chinese manufacturing in the past, except the export target has changed.
In the past, exports were clothes, home appliances, lithium batteries, photovoltaic modules; now exports are reasoning capabilities billed by Token, model services priced per call, and Agent execution power settled per request. Visible shipping containers are decreasing, while invisible Token flows are increasing. Therefore, the real inspiration of Token going global is not "which model is cheaper," but: Whoever can compress resources into Tokens more efficiently is closer to the pricing power in the next generation economic system. This is also why "Token is becoming the new currency unit" is not just a figure of speech.
AI is Devouring Everything, and Crypto is Its Settlement Organ
The popularity of OpenClaw is essentially not just a爆款 tool phenomenon, but a sign of the times. It shows that the role of AI is being upgraded: from "can talk" to "can do"; from "answering questions" to "replacing operations"; from "a chat window" to "a continuously executing actor." And every step AI takes forward, Token consumption rises another level; every piece of workflow it吞噬,催生 a new payment and settlement demand.
The fiat currency system can solve part of it, but it is not machine-native; the Crypto system is not perfect, but it at least天生 understands these problems. Therefore, rather than saying Crypto is chasing AI, it is better to say that AI is forcing Crypto to undergo an upgrade from "financial narrative" to "machine infrastructure."
The process of AI devouring the world requires a stomach to hold everything, and a wallet to fill this stomach. The former is computing power, the latter is Token.
Conclusion: The Future World Will Not Have Only One Currency, But Token May Become the Underlying Currency Unit
Of course, it is still too early to say that Token will become the "only currency unit." Fiat currency will not disappear, banks will not disappear, taxes, wages, sovereign credit, and regulatory frameworks will not fail overnight. The real economy will always be a multi-layered structure. But another trend is also increasingly difficult to ignore: many key value activities in the future will first be represented as Tokens, and then converted into other currencies.
What does this mean? It means that Token may not replace fiat currency, but it is very likely to first occupy the underlying level in the new economic system—becoming the accounting language for machine payments, the settlement interface for Agent commerce, the pricing benchmark for computing services, and the universal scale for digital resources. In this sense, the rise of Token is not a victory for the crypto market, nor a victory for AI manufacturers, but the formation of a new economic coordinate system.
The future may not be "everything on chain," but it is likely that "everything is first Tokenized, then enters交易." By that time, the real minting right is not just the power to issue currency, but the ability to efficiently compress resources into Tokens. And this is the part of the phrase "Token is becoming the new currency unit" that is most worth taking seriously.
