When cryptocurrency crosses the Silk Road
TechFlow Selected TechFlow Selected
When cryptocurrency crosses the Silk Road
We are always seeking ways to "cross boundaries."
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsBy Liu Honglin
This week I drove along the Hexi Corridor, passing through Wuwei, Zhangye, Jiuquan, and Dunhuang, crossing wind-swept passes beneath the Qilian Mountains. Only then did I realize the "Silk Road" was never just a romantic term—it meant endless sandstorms, relay stations stretching into the distance, and camel bells echoing across millennia. Standing beside the Han Dynasty Great Wall at sunset, a thought struck me: could something intangible like cryptocurrency possibly have anything in common with this ancient trade route that once connected Eastern and Western civilizations?
Thinking deeper, it actually makes sense.
The Silk Road was fundamentally a network of trust and payment. Thousands of miles of trade routes allowed merchants to travel from Chang’an to foreign kingdoms armed only with Han dynasty驿站 seals and rolls of silk; today, in the Web3 world, an Ethereum address can transfer value across borders. In the past, silk served as currency; today, tokens are digital silk. The medium has changed, but the logic remains the same: both aim to bypass geographical and political boundaries to enable trade, consensus, and trust.
From Caravans and Coins to On-Chain Tokens: The Journey of Payment and Trust
Today we take photos at the foot of Jiayuguan, thinking of it as the end of the Great Wall. But in Tang Dynasty times, it was the starting point for Central Asian caravans entering China. The path opened by Zhang Qian’s mission to the Western Regions later enabled the Han and Tang dynasties’ system of barter and “silk diplomacy.” Every transaction on the Silk Road had to answer one fundamental question: what counts as “money” here?
In eras without unified monetary systems, money was essentially a token of credit. A merchant leaving Zhangye might use Han wuzhu coins, but by Samarkand, silver, gold, or even camels themselves could become mediums of exchange. What truly enabled commerce was cross-linguistic, cross-cultural “payment negotiation” and mutual trust in identities. The circulation of currency rested upon a primitive yet highly effective decentralized consensus system.
In fact, “silk” in ancient times was not merely a commodity—it was itself a form of currency.
As early as the Han Dynasty, the imperial court officially used silk as wages for soldiers and frontier officials. As recorded in the Book of Han: Treatise on Food and Money: “Rewards and salaries are primarily paid in silk, which may serve as currency.” This means that in certain contexts, silk wasn’t just a tradable “commodity,” but an official payment instrument that could directly replace copper coins or precious metals.
Particularly in border regions, during wartime, or when metallic currency was scarce, silk—lightweight, durable, and high-value—became a “hard currency” in diplomacy. The Zizhi Tongjian records how the Tang Dynasty gifted “10,000 bolts of silk” to the Tibetan Empire for peace and trade. By the Song and Yuan dynasties, silk circulated widely in Central Asia, Persia, and even the Eastern Roman Empire, regarded as “noble currency from the East.”
This is the true meaning of the “Silk Road”: silk was not only cargo, but also a “settlement unit” along the route. Its value was accepted across civilizations, much like how USDT or BTC are recognized today by users in different countries. In the past, we crossed borders with fine silks; today, we traverse them with digital currencies.
This trading structure may sound ancient, but it bears striking resemblance to modern cryptocurrency transactions. In reality, in Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Nigeria, and elsewhere, a growing number of trades, remittances, and even retail payments are being settled using USDT or DAI. With just a wallet address, you don’t need a bank account or foreign exchange approval—funds can arrive across borders within minutes.
Especially since the rise of the Telegram ecosystem, the amount of USDT issued on the TON blockchain has rapidly surpassed $1 billion. On-chain payments are shifting from hype to real-world use cases: paying salaries, conducting代购, hiring overseas teams, purchasing servers—a whole gray-to-white zone of payment infrastructure becoming as simple as sending a WeChat red envelope.
It closely mirrors the ancient Silk Road’s logic of “barter + universal currency”: instead of relying on your own country’s settlement system, transactions are completed using a mutually trusted “third-party value medium.” Caravans have become wallet addresses, silver ingots have become tokens. The method of establishing trust has evolved, but the value of trust itself remains unchanged.
Why has Telegram become so popular? Not because it enables anonymous chatting, but because it inherently possesses cross-border functionality, cryptographic foundations, and strong user retention. Beyond WeChat, Telegram is one of the few truly global social platforms, and TON is precisely its extension into the blockchain world.
TON represents one of the closest attempts in today’s public blockchain landscape to recreate the Silk Road model: it integrates communication, accounts, payments, and transactions into a single seamless pipeline. Users can send wallet transfers, receive salaries, make micropayments, or even build bot-driven automated interactions—all within a chat interface. For users in Africa, Southeast Asia, and Central Asia, this system offers a practical alternative to banks and credit cards.
TON isn't alone—Sui, Solana, and BNB Chain are also pursuing similar “payment-focused” paths. But compared to other chains’ emphasis on DeFi, TON more closely resembles a full-stack ecosystem integrating “trade + identity + ledger + communication”—a structure far more aligned with the holistic coordination seen on the historical Silk Road.
Regulatory Balancing Act: From Maritime Trade Offices to On-Chain KYC
Of course, every wave of trade liberalization eventually triggers regulatory pushback.
The Tang Dynasty established the “Shibosi” (Maritime Trade Office) specifically to manage foreign commerce. According to the New Book of Tang: Treatise on Food and Money: “The Shiboshi oversees all foreign goods,” meaning anyone bringing goods into China via sea or land borders had to declare, pay taxes, undergo valuation, and exchange currency at designated ports. The Shibosi was not only a trade regulator but also the era’s primary foreign exchange management body.
Looking further back, the Han Dynasty’s “Guan Duwei” managed checkpoints along the Hexi Corridor, supervising passage, tariffs, and identities of merchants from the Western Regions. The Song Dynasty established “Quechang” (monopolized trade markets) to regulate licensed commerce and created the “Jiaoziwu” to oversee paper currency circulation. Together, these institutions formed the actual compliance framework operating along the ancient Silk Road.
If various blockchain ecosystems aspire to play the role of a “Digital Silk Road,” they will inevitably face the same challenge once confronted by the Tang Dynasty’s Shibosi: how to find the tipping point between free circulation and state regulation.
First is the issue of regulatory roles. Most blockchain projects claim technological neutrality, but once they embed wallets, list USDT, offer financial lending, and connect hundreds of millions globally, they inherently assume characteristics of a financial institution. Should they be regulated? Who should regulate them? Under which jurisdiction? These questions demand answers.
Second is audit and compliance. While blockchain data is transparent, transparency ≠ compliance. To conduct large-scale cross-border settlements, you must meet complex requirements like anti-money laundering (AML) and counter-terrorism financing (CFT), which often require user identity verification and fund trail tracing—creating natural tension with Web3 users’ prized values of “anonymity” and “decentralization.”
Finally, there’s taxation. In traditional trade, the quantity of goods, number of relay stations passed, and horse changes were all recorded, valued, and taxed accordingly. On-chain, peer-to-peer transaction trails are blurred, and DeFi profit sources are complex. How should governments define “taxable transactions”? Who is responsible for tax base reporting? These remain unresolved issues.
In short, every regulatory challenge facing Web3 payments today was already faced along the ancient Silk Road. Back then, the challenges were geography and military power; today, they’re code and regulation.
After Dunhuang: Our Enduring Quest to Cross Boundaries
On the day I left Dunhuang, I drove along National Highway G215, climbing over the Qilian Mountains, where my phone frequently lost signal. Winding roads stretched ahead, with snow-capped peaks in the distance and millennia-old weathered deserts and ancient paths beneath. In such a landscape, humans feel small, and technology feels silent—as if the digital age were still a thousand years away.
Yet in that silence, a simple, timeless truth came to mind: human civilization has always been defined by repeated efforts to cross boundaries.
Ancient travelers used caravans and paper permits to overcome geography and language; today, we use blockchains and smart contracts to transcend institutions and distrust. On the ruins of the Silk Road, we are neither the first nor the last to build cross-border settlement systems. This time, however, our tools are code, addresses, and on-chain consensus.
Technologies change, routes shift, but the urge to “cross over” has never faded in thousands of years. Once we walked the physical Silk Road; now we strive to build a digital one. Whether ancient relay stations or smart contracts, they stem from the same desire—to carve out a viable path for trust between order and chaos.
Join TechFlow official community to stay tuned
Telegram:https://t.me/TechFlowDaily
X (Twitter):https://x.com/TechFlowPost
X (Twitter) EN:https://x.com/BlockFlow_News
