From "Petrodollar" to "Electricity RMB": The Era Opportunity of AI + Stablecoin
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From "Petrodollar" to "Electricity RMB": The Era Opportunity of AI + Stablecoin
Whoever can organize electricity and computation most effectively will be better positioned to define the next generation of monetary interfaces.
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsAuthor: Charlie Liu
Preface
Twenty years ago, during my middle school years, I became fascinated with China's energy security, which eventually opened the door to my career in macro investing, global payments, and cryptocurrencies.
Today, during this historic opportunity period of productivity and production relationship revolution driven by AI and Crypto, the story has unexpectedly returned to its origin—energy and electricity.
A New Anchor for Money
In the AI era, "electricity" has become the new scarce resource.
Whoever can organize electricity and computing power at larger scale, lower cost, and higher stability will be better positioned to embed their currency into the next-generation payment network.
Stablecoins are not magic—they simply package a country’s industrial chain, energy chain, and settlement chain into a programmable "interface".
When that interface connects directly to power plants and data centers, money’s anchor quietly shifts from gold and oil to kilowatt-hours.
If we examine the timeline of the dollar: first anchored in gold, then in oil, followed later by "debt standard"—its unmatched fiscal system and treasury market providing ultimate liquidity.
This system won't collapse overnight, but in an age where AI revolutionizes productivity and Crypto revolutionizes production relationships, it is no longer the only natural option.
When money’s anchor shifts from physical assets to balance sheets, politics and maturity timelines seep into pricing.
Even if markets don’t accept the most pessimistic long-cycle narrative, they can still see another parallel pipeline being laid.
The Stablecoin Flywheel
Stablecoins are precisely this new pipeline, moving settlement from cross-border correspondent banking and messaging systems to public networks and peer-to-peer clearing.
Geopolitics turns abstract issues into concrete ones—when certain banks are excluded from SWIFT, or card networks suspend services in specific markets, enterprises and sovereigns naturally seek pathways that "cannot have their power unplugged".
No value judgment here—only physical reality: if your exports can settle via a track that others cannot unplug, your bargaining power compounds at network-effect speed.
This is why the news about a "RMB stablecoin", while appearing on the surface to be about tokens, is fundamentally about energy.
Over the past decade, China has exported overseas not just equipment and engineering, but a replicable, full-stack capability integrating power generation, transmission, storage, and data centers—the entire "power-compute-use" stack.
Tokens are merely the user experience of settlement; the moat lies in real, tangible supply capacity built from electricity, steel, and concrete.
This closed loop already operates in some places without tokens.
Capital expenditures for power plants come from China, equipment comes from China, operations, maintenance, and spare parts come from China, electricity bills are priced in RMB, and funds flow through Hong Kong, onshore, and offshore accounts.
Think of the wall socket as a cash flow inlet: electricity flows through local distribution grids and ends up in RMB accounts, bypassing dollar intermediation and value extraction.
Layering programmable settlement atop this path, stablecoins simply accelerate the process, turning financing and risk control into code.
Energy and Infrastructure
Why must it be energy?
Because AI has placed electricity at the center stage of money, because as AI scales widely, training and inference have evolved from mathematical problems into power problems.
Data centers today already consume a significant share of global electricity, and model scale and service density continue to rise.
Major U.S. tech companies are diving deep into "clean and stable baseload power": signing nuclear deals, locking in long-term contracts, deploying distributed generation and storage in tandem.
This isn't driven by ESG sentiment—it's dictated by the physical constraints of traditional energy.
The ceiling of AI is determined by the generator behind the socket.
The sharper question follows: who can build power infrastructure fastest, at largest scale, and on time and quality?
Bundling wind turbines, solar panels, inverters, transformers, HVDC transmission, phase regulators, storage, cooling, and园区 integration into turnkey solutions—and delivering them on schedule in unfamiliar geographies and regulatory environments—tests industrial cluster strength, supply chain resilience, and engineering "muscle memory".
Over the past decade, repeated iterations of highway, railway, hydropower, ultra-high voltage, and various zone projects overseas have made the "power-engineering-finance" flywheel increasingly smooth.
The most vivid memory was during my macro investing days at Franklin Templeton in 2014, traveling in Africa: a newly built highway stretching straight into Nairobi, a convention center in Zambia suddenly becoming a landmark.
To engineering teams, complex terrain is merely a project scheduling challenge. You may question capital efficiency, but it's hard to deny their ability to "deliver on time" in complex environments—precisely the scarcest component of the "power-currency" closed loop.
Investment capital efficiency might not be textbook "optimal", but the accumulated capability itself is an invisible moat not reflected on balance sheets.
Oil remains on stage, especially in the Middle East—a region embracing both crypto assets and novel settlement experiments.
But over the next decade, the center of gravity in energy will shift more toward renewable and localized clean power.
Hydropower, wind, solar, and storage lock value into geography; combined with national data sovereignty requirements, local data centers and local power form a natural pair: one transforms electricity into computation, the other turns computation into services, and settlement works best on rails that don't need to traverse foreign systems.
Implementing RMB Stablecoins
There are two very practical pathways here.
The first is direct settlement for electricity.
Power purchase agreements fit the programmable nature of stablecoins better than commodity trade—how much is generated, metered, and paid can be fully digitized, allowing money to follow the electricity meter.
RMB-denominated electricity fees, maintenance costs, and lease financing already exist today; tokenization simply makes payments faster, financing more flexible, and collateral more composable.
The second is settlement for computing power and model services.
Electricity becomes "AI output" inside data centers, where enterprises and developers pay in stablecoins for API calls, model tokens, vector storage, and inference time.
Many emerging markets already use dollar stablecoins as "dollar proxies" for cross-border digital services. When supply chains and service providers increasingly originate from China, an offshore RMB stablecoin becomes a natural second choice.
If this framework still feels abstract, consider a once-mocked case.
In 2021, while leading global strategy at Jack Mallers’ Strike, I helped El Salvador adopt Bitcoin as legal tender. The president proposed using "volcanic geothermal energy" for mining, turning local resources into globally liquid digital assets.
The execution wasn't perfect, but the direction was right: transforming geographically unique natural endowments into tradable value units through energy and code.
AI and stablecoins are now industrializing this idea.
Back then, "mining with volcanoes" was laughed at; today, leveraging local energy to digitize value looks more like an early version of an "electricity standard".
The Flywheel of the Next-Gen Global Expansion
Back to the main thread: from oil to electricity, the key to closing the loop lies in the "recycling" of currency.
In the past, when people questioned settling energy in RMB, the biggest rebuttal was, "What can you buy with the RMB you receive?"
The traditional answers were offshore RMB pools, dim sum bonds, panda bonds—usable, but thin markets.
The new answer is more direct: buy power, buy compute, buy equipment, buy services.
If your generators, inverters, storage systems, vehicles, and charging infrastructure come from China, if maintenance and upgrades come from China, if data center hardware, software, and services come from China, then foreign exchange reserves can recycle without dollar intermediation.
Moreover, as broader "Made-in-China intelligence" goes global, RMB can buy nearly everything needed for life and business. We could even stop white-labeling overseas brands and instead deliver genuine high-quality direct supply.
Of course, this means the "second half" of global expansion demands greater effort in branding and storytelling—but at least currency purchasing power and liquidity pools grow organically through stacked supply-side capabilities.
New Dynamics in Great Power Competition and Cooperation
To state the conclusion bluntly: the winner of the stablecoin race may not be the token with the best audit or friendliest regulation, but the monetary system most tightly coupled with "low-cost, stable electricity and high-density computing power".
If China advances an offshore RMB stablecoin, its real "secret weapon" isn't token design, but the proven ability to deliver wind turbines, solar panels, transformers, ultra-high voltage lines, and data centers globally—all priced in RMB.
That would mark the emergence of a new monetary order shifting from an "oil anchor" to an "electricity anchor".
Of course, this path isn't noise-free.
Nuclear and clean "strong baseload" power expansion face bottlenecks in permitting and supply chains, making rapid scaling difficult in the short term.
And don’t underestimate America’s self-repair capability: if a compliant U.S. dollar stablecoin framework succeeds, paired with massive investments in clean and stable power, the dollar’s network effects could gain another software-layer boost.
In direction, AI has already established electricity as the new binding constraint; under such constraints, payments will follow the lowest-cost path, and money will follow.
If I were to leave one sentence from this article for readers, it would be this:
AI makes electricity the "first-principles variable", while crypto and stablecoins simply connect this physical variable directly to the monetary system; whoever can organize power and computation most effectively will be better positioned to define the next-generation monetary interface.
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@charliecliu
