From caravan silver coins to on-chain tokens, Crypto Assets traversed the Silk Road.

Author: Liu Honglin

This week, I drove along the Hexi Corridor, traveling from Wuwei, Zhangye, Jiuquan to Dunhuang, passing through the sandy pass at the foot of the Qilian Mountains. Only then did I realize that the “Silk Road” is not a romantic term; it is filled with swirling sands, continuous relay stations, and the sound of camel bells echoing through the millennia. Standing by the Han Great Wall watching the sunset, a thought crossed my mind: is there any connection between cryptocurrency, this invisible and intangible thing, and this ancient trade route that once supported Eurasian civilization?

Thinking carefully, it is indeed quite interesting.

The Silk Road is essentially a channel of trust and payment. On the trade route of thousands of miles, a merchant could conduct business outside of Chang’an and in various countries along the way with a Han dynasty postal seal and a few rolls of silk. Today, in the Web3 world, an Ethereum address can complete value transfers across borders. The silk of the past was currency; today’s Token is digital silk. Only the medium has changed, the logic remains the same: both are meant to bypass geographical and power boundaries to achieve transactions, consensus, and trust.

From Caravan Silver Coins to On-Chain Tokens: The Journey of Payment and Trust

Today we are taking photos at the foot of Jiayuguan, feeling that this is the end of the Great Wall. But during the Tang Dynasty, it was the starting point for Central Asian merchant caravans entering China. The route opened up by Zhang Qian’s mission to the Western Regions later supported the entire Han and Tang dynasties’ “barter” and “silk diplomacy.” Every transaction on the Silk Road had to solve a fundamental question: what do you use as “money”?

In an era of disunified currency systems, the essence of currency is a credit certificate. Merchants departing from Zhangye may use Han Wuzhu coins, but upon reaching Samarkand, silver coins, gold, or even camels themselves could become mediums of exchange. What truly facilitates transactions is the “payment negotiation” across languages and cultures and the trust in each other’s identities. The circulation of currency is actually built upon a very primitive yet efficient “decentralized” consensus system.

In fact, “silk” itself was not just a commodity in ancient times; it was a currency in itself.

As early as the Han Dynasty, the court clearly used silk and satin as salaries for the army and officials in the border areas. The “Book of Han: Treatise on Food and Money” states: “Rewards and salaries are all given in silk, and silk can replace currency.” In other words, in certain circumstances, silk was not just a “commodity” used for trade, but also an “official payment tool” that could directly replace copper coins and gold and silver.

Especially during times of border conflicts, war, or shortages of metal currency, silk and satin became lightweight, durable, and high-value goods, even becoming a “diplomatic hard currency”. The “Comprehensive Mirror in Aid of Governance” records that the Tang dynasty “gifted ten thousand rolls of silk to Tubo” as a means of appeasement and trade exchange. By the Song and Yuan dynasties, silk was widely circulated in Central Asia, Persia, and even the Eastern Roman Empire, regarded as “noble currency from the East.”

This is also the true meaning of the “Silk Road”: silk is not just a commodity, but a “settlement unit” along the route. Its value is accepted by various civilizations along the way, just as today USDT or BTC is recognized by users from different countries. In the past, we crossed borders with fine silk and satin, and now we traverse national boundaries with digital currency.

This trading structure sounds ancient, yet it has an astonishing similarity to today’s cryptocurrency trading. In reality, in places like Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Nigeria, a large number of trades, remittances from immigrants, and even retail payments have begun to use USDT or DAI for settlement. As long as you have a wallet address, you don’t need to open a bank account, nor do you need to go through foreign exchange management; funds can be transferred across countries within a few minutes.

Especially after the rise of the Telegram ecosystem, the issuance of USDT on the TON chain quickly exceeded 1 billion US dollars. On-chain payments have gradually shifted from speculation to real scenarios: paying salaries, making purchases, hiring overseas teams, and procuring servers—an entire set of payment pathways in gray and white areas is becoming as simple as sending a WeChat red envelope.

It is actually very similar to the logic of “barter + universal currency” on the ancient Silk Road: instead of using your own country’s settlement system, transactions are completed using a “third medium of value” that everyone trusts. The caravan has been replaced by wallet addresses, silver ingots have been replaced by tokens, the way of trust has changed, but the value of trust itself has not.

Why is Telegram popular? Not because it can chat anonymously, but because it inherently has cross-border attributes, encryption foundations, and user stickiness. Outside of WeChat, Telegram is one of the few “global social software” applications, and TON is precisely its extension in the blockchain world.

TON is an attempt that is closest to the “Silk Road” form in the current blockchain public chain system: it opens up the whole link of communication, account, payment and transaction, and users can complete wallet transfers, receive wages, make micropayments, and even build bot automation interaction logic in the chat box. For users in Africa, Southeast Asia, and Central Asia, this system is a realistic way to skip banks and credit cards.

TON is not an isolated case; Sui, Solana, and BNB Chain are also on a similar “payment-oriented” path. However, compared to the “DeFi-oriented” approach of other public chains, TON resembles a complete stack ecosystem that replicates “transactions + identity + ledger + communication”—it is more aligned with the collaborative nature of the Silk Road.

Compliance Gaming: From the Maritime Trade Office to On-Chain KYC

Of course, every time trade liberalization occurs, there will be a backlash of regulation.

During the Tang Dynasty, the “Shibo Si” was established to manage overseas trade. The “New Book of Tang, Food and Currency Records” states: “The Shibo Shi is responsible for foreign goods,” meaning that as long as you bring goods into China from the sea or border areas, you must declare them, pay taxes, have them assessed, and exchange currency at specific ports. The Shibo Si was not only a trade regulatory body but also the most important foreign exchange management department at that time.

Looking back, during the Han Dynasty, the “Guandu Wei” was responsible for managing the checkpoints in the Hexi Corridor, overseeing the passage, tariffs, and identities of merchants traveling to and from the Western Regions; while in the Song Dynasty, “Qiaochang” was established to manage licensed trade, and “Jiaozi Wu” was used to supervise the circulation of paper currency. These systems together formed a real “compliance framework” that existed along the ancient Silk Road.

If various blockchain ecosystems want to take on the role of the “Digital Silk Road,” they will eventually have to face a reality problem similar to that of the Tang Dynasty’s Maritime Trade Office: how to find that critical point between free circulation and national regulation.

First, there is the issue of the role of regulation. The vast majority of blockchain projects claim to be technologically neutral, but when they embed wallets, launch USDT, provide financial lending, and connect with hundreds of millions of users globally, they inherently possess the attributes of a “financial institution.” Whether or not it should be regulated, who should regulate it, and under what jurisdiction it should be regulated—these questions all need to be addressed.

Next is audit and compliance. On-chain data is indeed transparent, but transparency ≠ compliance. If you want to engage in large-scale cross-border settlements, you must meet complex requirements such as anti-money laundering and counter-terrorism financing, which often means user identity penetration and fund path identification—this creates an inherent tension with the “anonymity” and “decentralization” that Web3 users value the most.

Finally, there is the issue of taxes. In traditional trade, how much goods you carry, how many relay stations you pass through, and how many times you change horses are all recorded, appraised, and taxed. However, on-chain, the paths of P2P transactions are vague, and the sources of profit in DeFi are complex. How should countries define “taxable transactions”? Who is responsible for tax base declaration? These are still unresolved questions.

In simple terms, all the regulatory challenges that Web3 payments face today were actually experienced during the ancient Silk Road. The challenges back then were geography and military power, while today’s challenges are code and regulation.

Written after Dunhuang: We are always looking for ways to “cross boundaries”.

On the day I left Dunhuang, I traveled along the G215 national highway, crossing the Qilian Mountains, with my phone often having no signal. The mountain roads wound around, with snow-capped peaks that never melted in the distance, and beneath my feet were the weathered Gobi Desert and ancient paths that had existed for thousands of years. In such a landscape, people seem small, and technology feels quiet, as if the digital age is still a thousand years away from here.

But it is precisely in such silence that I am reminded of a simple yet unchanging proposition: human civilization has always been a series of efforts to cross boundaries.

Ancient people used camel caravans and paper customs documents to traverse geography and language; today we use blockchain and smart contracts to attempt to cross systems and trust. On the ruins of the Silk Road, we are not establishing a cross-border settlement system for the first time, nor will it be the last. It’s just that this time, we are using code, addresses, and on-chain consensus.

Technology changes, routes may be altered, but the impulse to “cross over” has never extinguished in thousands of years. In the past, we traveled the physical Silk Road, and now we are trying to establish a digital Silk Road. Whether it is an ancient post station or a smart contract, they essentially represent the same desire—between order and chaos, we must always carve out a feasible path for trust.