From Camel Caravan Silver Coins to On-Chain Tokens, Cryptocurrency Crosses Silk Road

Author: Liu Honglin

This week, I drove in the Hexi Corridor, from Wuwei, Zhangye, Jiuquan to Dunhuang, and through the wind and sand mouth at the foot of the Qilian Mountains, I realized that the "Silk Road" is not a romantic word, but a wind and sand all over the sky, continuous post stations and a thousand-year-old camel bells. While standing by the Great Wall of Han, watching the sunset, an idea emerged. Does virtual currency, such as invisible and intangible, have any connection with this trade path that once supported Eurasian civilization?

If you think about it carefully, it's really interesting.

The Silk Road is essentially a path of trust and payment. On the road of trade for thousands of miles, a merchant can leave Chang'an and do business with the Han Dynasty post seal and a few rolls of silk; and in today's Web3 world, an Ethereum address can complete value transfer across national boundaries. The silk in the past was currency; today's Token is digital silk. But the carrier has changed, the logic has not changed: it is all about bypassing the boundaries of geography and power, reaching transactions, consensus and trust.

From Camel Caravan Silver Coins to On-chain Token: A Time-travel of

Payment and Trust

We stood at the foot of Jiayuguan today to take photos and felt that this was the end of the Great Wall. But in the Tang Dynasty, it was the starting point for Central Asian caravans to enter China. The road opened by Zhang Qian on his mission to the Western Regions later supported the "bartering" and "silk diplomacy" of the entire Han and Tang dynasties. Every transaction on the Silk Road has to solve a fundamental problem: What are you using for "money"?

In an era when the monetary system was inconsistent, the essence of money was credit certificates. The merchants who set out in Zhangye may use Han Wuzhu coins, but in Samarkand, silver coins, gold and even camels themselves may become mediums of exchange. What really makes transactions flow is cross-linguistic and cross-cultural "payment negotiation" and trust in each other's identities. The circulation of currency is actually based on a very primitive but efficient "decentralized" consensus system.

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

As early as the Han Dynasty, the court had clearly used silk as the salary of military and border officials. "Han Shu·Food and Memorandum Records" states: "Rewards and salary are both topped with silk, and silk can be tokens." That is to say, in some cases, silk is not only a "commodity" used for trading, but also a "official payment tool" that can directly replace copper coins, gold and silver.

Especially in frontiers, wartime or metal currency shortages, silk, as light, storage-resistant and high-value materials, even became a "diplomatic hard currency." "Zizhi Tongjian" records that the Tang Dynasty "given thousands of silks" to Tubo as a pacification and trade exchange. By the Song and Yuan dynasties, silk was widely circulated in Central Asia, Persia and even the Eastern Roman Empire, and was regarded as "aristian currency from the East."

This is also the true meaning of the "Silk Road": silk is not only a cargo, but also a "settlement" on the path. Its value is accepted by civilizations along the route, just as USDT or BTC is recognized by users in different countries today. In the past, we used silk and satin to cross the border, but now we use digital currency to cross the border.

This transaction structure sounds old, but it actually has an amazing similarity to today's virtual currency transactions. In reality, in Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Nigeria and other places, a large number of trade, immigration remittances and even retail payments have begun to use USDT or DAI to complete liquidation. As long as you have a wallet address, you don’t need to open a bank account or go to external management, the funds can be received across countries within a few minutes.

Especially after the rise of the Telegram ecosystem, the issuance of USDT on-chain by TON quickly exceeded US$1 billion, and on-chain payment gradually shifted from hype to real scenarios: paying wages, doing purchasing agents, hiring overseas teams, purchasing servers - a complete set of payment paths in the gray area are becoming as simple as sending WeChat red envelopes.

It is actually very similar to the logic of "exchange of things + universal currency" on the ancient Silk Road: it is not to use the settlement system in your country, but to complete the transactions by everyone's common trust. The camel caravan was replaced with a wallet address and the silver ingot was replaced with a token. The way of trust changed, but the value of trust itself did not change.

Telegram Why is it popular? It is not because it can chat anonymously, but because it naturally has cross-border attributes, encryption foundation and user stickiness. Outside WeChat, Telegram is one of the few "global social software", and TON is exactly its extension in the blockchain world.

TON is an attempt closest to the "Silk Road" form in the current blockchain public chain system: it opens up the entire link of communications, accounts, payments and transactions. Users can complete wallet transfers, receive wages, make micro-payments in the chat box, and even build Bot automated interactive logic. For users in Africa, Southeast Asia and Central Asia, this system is a realistic path to skip banks and credit cards.

TON is not an isolated case. Sui, Solana, and BNB Chain are all following a similar path of "paymentization". But compared to the "DeFi" of other public chains, TON is more like replicating a full-stack ecosystem of "transaction + identity + ledger + communication" - it is closer to the Silk Road's full-factor synergy form.

Compliance Game: From Maritime to On-chain KYC

Of course, every trade liberalization will usher in a regulatory resurgence.

The Tang Dynasty established the "Marine and Commercial Bureau" to manage overseas trade in full-time. "New Book of Tang: Food and Goods" records: "Marine ships are responsible for foreign goods", which means that as long as you bring goods into China from sea or borders, you must declare, pay taxes, value, and exchange coins at specific ports. The Maritime Administration was not only a trade regulatory agency, but also the most important foreign exchange management department at that time.

Looking back, the "Guan Duwei" of the Han Dynasty was in charge of the entry and exit of the Hexi Corridor and was responsible for supervising the passage, tariffs and identities of business travel in the Western Regions; while the Song Dynasty set up a "Qiantian" to manage franchise trade and supervise the circulation of paper money through "Jiaziwu". Together, these systems constitute the "compliance framework" that really existed on the ancient Silk Road.

If various blockchain ecology wants to assume the role of the "Digital Silk Road", sooner or later they will have to face a realistic problem like the Tang Dynasty Maritime Bureau: how to find that critical point between free circulation and national supervision.

First of all, it is the role of supervision. Most blockchain projects will say that technology is neutral, but when it embeds wallets, launches USDT, financial lending, and links hundreds of millions of users around the world, it naturally has the attributes of "financial institutions". Should it be regulated, who will supervise, and what legal jurisdiction to regulate - these questions need to be answered.

The second is audit and compliance. The data on the chain is indeed transparent, but transparency ≠ compliance. If you want to do large-scale cross-border clearing, you have to meet complex requirements such as anti-money laundering and anti-terrorism financing, which often means user identity penetration and fund path identification - there is naturally tension between this and the "anonymity" and "decentralization" that Web3 users value the most.

Finally, there is the tax issue. In traditional trade, people register, estimate and pay taxes for how much goods you bring, how many stations you pass, and how many times you change horses. On the chain, the transaction path of P2P is vague and the profit source of DeFi is complex. How should the country define "taxable transactions"? Who is responsible for tax base declaration? These are still unresolved questions.

Simply put, all the regulatory difficulties faced by Web3 payment today have actually been experienced in the ancient Silk Road. But the challenge at that time was geography and force, while the challenge now was code and regulation.

After writing in Dunhuang: We are always looking for ways to "cross the

boundaries"

The day I left Dunhuang, I crossed the Qilian Mountains along the G215 National Highway, and my phone often had no signal. The mountain road circles, and in the distance is the snowy ridge that has never melted all year round, and under your feet are the Gobi Desert and ancient roads that have been weathered for thousands of years. In such a landform, people appear small and technology seems quiet, as if the digital age is still a thousand years away.

But it is in this silence that I remembered a simple but unchanging proposition: human civilization has always been one effort after another to cross the border.

The ancients used camel caravans and paper customs clearance documents, and they traveled through geography and language; today we used blockchain and smart contracts, and they tried to cross systems and trust. On the ruins of the Silk Road, it is not the first time we have established a transnational settlement system, nor will it be the last. But this time, we are using code, address and on-chain consensus.

Technology will change, the route will change, but the urge to "take over" has never been extinguished for thousands of years. In the past, we took the physical Silk Road, but now we are trying to build the digital Silk Road. Whether it is an ancient post station or a smart contract, it is essentially the same desire - between order and chaos, we must always open up a feasible path for trust.