Driving along the Hexi Corridor this week, from Wuwei, Zhangye, Jiuquan to Dunhuang, and passing through Fengshakou at the foot of the Qilian Mountains, I realized that the "Silk Road" is not a romantic word, but a sky full of sand, continuous post stations and millennium camel bells. When standing by the Han Great Wall and watching the sunset, a thought came to my mind: could something invisible and intangible like virtual currency have anything to do with this trade route that once supported Eurasian civilization?

Thinking about it carefully, it's really interesting.

The Silk Road is essentially a channel of trust and payment. On the thousands of miles of trade route, a merchant could walk out of Chang'an and do business with countries along the way with a Han Dynasty post seal and a few rolls of silk; and in today's Web3 world, an Ethereum address can complete value transfer across borders. In the past, silk was currency; today's tokens are digital silk. Only the carrier has changed, the logic has not changed: all are to bypass geographical and power boundaries, to reach transactions, consensus and trust.

From Camel Caravan Silver Coins to On-chain Tokens: A Crossing of Payment and Trust

Today we stood at the foot of Jiayuguan and took pictures, thinking that this is 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's mission to the Western Regions later supported the "barter" and "silk diplomacy" of the entire Han and Tang dynasties. Every transaction on the Silk Road must solve a fundamental problem: What do you use as "money"?

In an era of inconsistent monetary systems, the essence of currency is a credit certificate. Merchants from Zhangye may use Han Wuzhu coins, but in Samarkand, silver coins, gold and even camels themselves may become the medium of exchange. What really makes the transaction flow is the cross-language and cross-cultural "payment negotiation" and the trust in each other's identity. 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 kind of currency.

As early as the Han Dynasty, the court had clearly used silk as the salary of the army and border officials. "Han Shu·Shihuo Zhi" states: "Rewards and salaries are all based on silk, and silk can be used as a token." That is to say, in some cases, silk is not just a "commodity" for trading, but also an "official payment tool" that can directly replace copper coins, gold and silver.

Especially in frontier areas, wartime or periods of metal currency shortage, silk, as a light, durable and high-value material, even became a "diplomatic hard currency". "Zizhi Tongjian" records that the Tang Dynasty "gifted 10,000 pieces of silk" to Tubo as a consolation and trade exchange. In the Song and Yuan dynasties, silk was widely circulated in Central Asia, Persia and even the Eastern Roman Empire, and was regarded as "noble currency from the East".

This is also the true meaning of the "Silk Road": silk is not only a commodity, but also a "settlement unit" on the route. 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 borders, and now we use digital currency to cross borders.

This transaction structure sounds ancient, but it is actually surprisingly similar 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 settlement. You only need a wallet address, no need to open a bank account, no need to go to foreign exchange management, and funds can be transferred across borders 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, and on-chain payments gradually shifted from hype to real scenarios: paying wages, purchasing on behalf of others, hiring overseas teams, purchasing servers - a whole set of payment paths in the gray and white area are becoming as simple as sending WeChat red envelopes.

It is actually very similar to the logic of "barter + universal currency" on the ancient Silk Road: not using your own country's settlement system, but a "third value medium" that everyone trusts to complete the transaction. Camel caravans have 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 changed.

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

TON is the closest attempt to the "Silk Road" form in the current blockchain public chain system: it opens up the full link of communication, accounts, payments and transactions. Users can complete wallet transfers, receive wages, make micropayments, and even build Bot automated interaction logic in the chat box. 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 also taking a similar "payment" path. However, compared with the "DeFiization" of other public chains, TON is more like replicating a full-stack ecosystem of "transaction + identity + ledger + communication" - it is closer to the full-factor synergy of the Silk Road.

Compliance Game: From Shibosi to On-chain KYC

Of course, every time trade liberalization is implemented, there will be a resurgence of regulation behind it.

The "Shibosi" was established in the Tang Dynasty to specialize in the management of overseas trade. The New Book of Tang, Food and Goods, records that "Shiboshi is in charge of foreign goods", which means that as long as you bring goods into China from the sea or the border, you have to declare, pay taxes, value, and exchange currency at a specific port. The Shibosi is not only a trade regulatory agency, but also the most important foreign exchange management department at that time.

Going back, the "Guan Duwei" of the Han Dynasty was in charge of the entry and exit checkpoints of the Hexi Corridor, responsible for supervising the passage, tariffs, and identities of merchants and travelers from the Western Regions; while the Song Dynasty set up "Quechang" to manage licensed trade and supervised the circulation of paper money through "Jiaoziwu". These systems together constitute the real "compliance framework" on the ancient Silk Road.

If various blockchain ecosystems want to take on the role of the "Digital Silk Road", they will sooner or later face the same realistic problem as the Shibosi of the Tang Dynasty: how to find the critical point between free circulation and state supervision.

First, there is the role of supervision. Most blockchain projects will say that technology is neutral, but when it has a built-in wallet, launches USDT, financial lending, and links hundreds of millions of users around the world, it naturally has the attributes of a "financial institution". Whether it should be regulated, who will regulate it, and under what jurisdiction - these questions need to be answered.

The second is auditing 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-terrorist financing, which often means user identity penetration and capital path identification - there is a natural tension between this and the "anonymity" and "decentralization" that Web3 users value most.

Finally, there is the issue of taxes. In traditional trade, no matter how much goods you carry, how many post stations you pass through, or how many times you change horses, someone will register, value, and pay taxes. On the chain, the transaction path of P2P is vague, and the profit source of DeFi is complicated. How should the country define "taxable transactions"? Who is responsible for tax base declaration? These are still unresolved issues.

In short, all the regulatory challenges faced by Web3 payments today have actually been experienced by the ancient Silk Road. It's just that the challenges at that time were geography and force, while the challenges now are code and supervision.

Written after Dunhuang: We are always looking for ways to "cross the border"

The day I left Dunhuang, I crossed the Qilian Mountains along the G215 National Highway, and my mobile phone often had no signal. The mountain road is winding, with snow-capped mountains in the distance and Gobi and ancient roads weathered for thousands of years at the foot. In such a landscape, people seem small and technology seems quiet, as if the digital age is still thousands of years away.

But it is in such silence that I think of a simple but unchanging proposition: Human civilization has always been an effort to cross borders one after another.

The ancients used camel caravans and paper customs documents to cross geography and language; today we use blockchain and smart contracts to try to cross institutions and trust. On the ruins of the Silk Road, this is not the first time we have established a cross-border settlement system, nor will it be the last. It's just that this time, we use code, address and on-chain consensus.

Technology will change, routes will change, but the urge to "cross over" has never been extinguished for thousands of years. In the past, we took the physical Silk Road, and now we are trying to build a 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.