Source: The Loop Lion on Dune Road
Written by: Charlie Little Sun
Introduction
Twenty years ago, during my high school years, I became fascinated with the topic of China's energy security, which later opened the doors to my career in macro investment, global payments, and cryptocurrency.
In today's historical opportunity period brought about by the productivity + production relationship revolution due to AI and Crypto, I never expected the story to return to the origin of energy and electricity.
The New Anchor of Currency
In the AI era, "electricity" has become the new scarce resource.
Whoever can organize electricity and computing power on a larger scale, at a lower cost, and with greater stability is more qualified to embed their currency into the next generation of payment networks.
Stablecoins are not magic; they simply package a country's industrial chain, energy chain, and settlement chain into a programmable "interface."
When the 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 on the oil standard, and later on the "debt standard"—the unparalleled fiscal and national debt market provided ultimate liquidity.
This system cannot collapse overnight, and in this era of "AI revolutionizing productivity and Crypto revolutionizing production relationships," 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 recognize the most pessimistic long-cycle narrative, another parallel channel is being laid.
The Flywheel of Stablecoins
Stablecoins are this new channel, moving settlement from cross-border agency 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 card organizations suspend services in certain markets, enterprises and sovereigns will naturally seek pathways that cannot be "unplugged."
No value judgments here, just discussing physical reality: if your exports can be settled on a track that others cannot unplug, 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.
In the past decade, China has exported not just equipment and engineering overseas, but has also turned the full-stack capabilities of "electricity—computation—usage" into replicable products.
Tokens are merely the user experience of settlement; the moat lies in the solid supply capacity built from electricity and reinforced concrete.
This closed loop is already operating in some places in a "no-token version."
The capital expenditure for power stations comes from China, equipment comes from China, operation and maintenance and spare parts come from China, and electricity settlement is priced in Renminbi, with funds linked through Hong Kong and onshore-offshore accounts.
Think of the wall socket as a cash flow entry point; electricity passes through the local distribution network and finally lands in a Renminbi account, without needing to transfer through dollars to harvest value.
Adding a layer of programmable settlement to this path, stablecoins simply speed things up, making financing and risk control into code.
Energy and Infrastructure
Why Must It Be Energy?
Because AI has pushed electricity to the center stage of currency, and with the large-scale proliferation of AI, training and inference have risen from mathematical problems to electricity problems.
Today, data centers consume a significant share of global electricity, and the scale of models and service density continues to rise.
Large tech companies in the U.S. are diving into "clean and stable baseload power": nuclear power contracts, long-term agreements, and a combination of distributed 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 a sharper question: who can build electricity the fastest, on the largest scale, and on time and with quality?
Integrating wind turbines, photovoltaics, inverters, transformers, direct current transmission, phase adjustment, 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."
In the past decade, projects in roads, railways, hydropower, ultra-high voltage, and various parks have iterated overseas, making the "electricity—engineering—finance" flywheel increasingly smooth.
The most intuitive feeling was when I was doing macro investment at Franklin Templeton in 2014, and during a business trip to Africa, the newly built highway connected directly to Nairobi, and Zambia's convention center suddenly became a new local landmark.
The engineering team faced complex terrain and treated it merely as a progress management issue. You can question funding efficiency, but it is hard to deny the ability to "deliver on time" in complex environments, which is precisely the most scarce part of the "electricity—currency" closed loop.
The capital efficiency of investment may not be the "optimal" in textbooks, but capability is built over the long term, which is a moat that cannot be seen 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 will shift more towards renewable and "localized" clean electricity in the next decade.
Hydropower, wind, solar, and storage lock value above geography, and with the overlay of various countries' data sovereignty requirements, local data centers and local electricity are a natural pair: one side is electricity turning into computation, and the other side is computation turning into services, with settlement best following a path that does not need to traverse foreign systems.
The Implementation of Renminbi Stablecoins
There are two very practical pathways here.
The first is direct electricity settlement.
Electricity purchase and sale contracts align more closely with the programmable attributes of stablecoins than commodity trade—how much to generate, how much to meter, how much to pay, with full-chain data. Currency can follow the electricity meter.
Today, there are already electricity fees, operation and maintenance fees, and financing leases priced in Renminbi; tokenization merely makes the accounts faster, financing more flexible, and collateral more combinable.
The second is for computing power and model service settlement.
Electricity transforms into "AI output" in data centers, and enterprises and developers use stablecoins to purchase API calls, model tokens, vector storage, and inference time.
Many emerging markets have long used dollar stablecoins as "dollar substitutes" for cross-border digital services. As more supply chains and services come from China, an offshore Renminbi stablecoin becomes a second choice that flows smoothly.
If this framework still seems abstract, let's return to a case that was once ridiculed.
In 2021, while I was responsible for global strategy at Jack Mallers' Strike, I helped El Salvador make Bitcoin legal tender. At that time, 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 correct: turning "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 like a precursor to "electricity standard."
The Flywheel of the Second Half of Going Global
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 was offshore Renminbi pools, dim sum bonds, panda bonds—usable, but the market is thin.
The new answer is more direct: buy electricity, buy computation, buy equipment, buy services.
If your generator sets, inverters, storage systems, vehicles, and charging facilities come from China, and operation, maintenance, and upgrades come from China, and the software and services of data centers come from China, then the "recycling" of foreign exchange reserves does not require a dollar jump.
Moreover, as broader "China manufacturing" goes global, the things that can be bought with Renminbi can almost meet all aspects of life and business needs. We can even abandon white-labeling for overseas brands and provide truly high-quality direct supply.
Of course, this means that in the "second half of going global," we need to do more homework on brand power and storytelling, but at least the purchasing power and liquidity pool of currency will naturally grow in the supply-side stacking.
The New Competitive and Cooperative Game of Great Powers
If we put the conclusion in a more uncomfortable way: the winner of the stablecoin war may not necessarily be the token with the best audit or the most friendly regulation, but rather the currency system that is most tightly coupled with "low-cost, stable electricity and high-density computing power."
If China promotes offshore Renminbi stablecoins, the real "secret weapon" is not the token design, but the ability to deliver wind turbines, photovoltaics, transformers, ultra-high voltage, and data centers globally, all priced in Renminbi.
That would be a new monetary order transitioning from "oil anchor" to "electricity anchor."
Of course, this path is not without noise.
The expansion of nuclear power and clean "strong baseload" electricity will be constrained by approvals and supply chains, making it difficult to achieve overnight.
And do not underestimate the self-repairing ability of the U.S.: if the dollar version of the compliant stablecoin framework runs smoothly while making significant investments in clean, stable electricity, the network effect of the dollar can completely layer on the software level.
In terms of direction, AI has established electricity as the new constraint; in the face of constraints, payments will follow the path of least cost, and currency will follow suit.
If I were to leave one sentence for readers from this article, I would choose this one:
AI has made electricity the "first principle variable"; crypto and stablecoins merely connect this physical variable directly to the currency system; whoever can most effectively organize electricity and computation is more qualified to define the next generation of currency interfaces.
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