From "Petrodollar" to "Electric Renminbi": Era Opportunities for AI+ Stablecoins

Preface

Twenty years ago, I became fascinated by the topic of China's energy security during my middle school years, which later opened the door for me to a career in macro investing, global payments, and cryptocurrency.

In today's historic opportunity period brought about by the productivity and production relations revolution triggered by AI and Crypto, it is unexpected that the story has returned to the origin of energy and electricity.

The New Anchor of Currency

In the AI era, "electricity" has become the new scarce factor.

Whoever can organize electricity and computing power on a larger scale, at lower cost, and with greater stability, is more qualified 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 the interface is connected to power plants and data centers, the anchor of currency quietly shifts from gold and oil to kilowatt-hours.

If we look at the timeline of the US dollar story: the first half relied on the gold standard, the second half on the oil standard, and later on the "debt standard"—an unparalleled fiscal and Treasury market provided ultimate liquidity.

This system cannot collapse overnight, but in this era of"AI revolutionizing productivity, Crypto revolutionizing production relations", it is no longer the only natural option.

When the anchor of currency shifts from physical goods to balance sheets, politics and duration will seep into pricing.

Even if the market does not agree with the most pessimistic long-cycle narrative, it is clear that another parallel pipeline is being laid.

The Stablecoin Flywheel

Stablecoins are this new pipeline, moving clearing from cross-border agents and messaging systems to public networks and peer-to-peer settlement.

Geopolitics makes abstract problems very concrete—when certain banks are excluded from SWIFT, when card organizations suspend services in certain markets, enterprises and sovereigns will naturally seek channels that "cannot be unplugged."

No value judgment here, just physical reality: if your exports can be settled through a channel that cannot be unplugged by others, your bargaining power will compound at the speed of network effects.

This is also why the news of a "RMB stablecoin" appears to be about tokens on the surface, but is fundamentally about energy at its core.

For more than a decade, what China has exported overseas is not just equipment and engineering, but a replicable product of the full-stack capability of "electricity—computing—usage" covering power generation, transmission, energy storage, and data centers.

Tokens are just the user experience of settlement; the real moat lies in the tangible supply capacity built from electricity and reinforced concrete.

This closed loop has actually been running in some places in a "non-token version."

Capital expenditure for power stations comes from China, equipment comes from China, operations and spare parts come from China, electricity bills are settled in RMB, and funds are connected through Hong Kong and onshore/offshore accounts.

Think of the wall socket as a cash flow entry point; electricity fees pass through the local distribution network and finally end up in an RMB account, with no need for the US dollar to extract a layer of value in between.

By adding a layer of programmable settlement to this path, stablecoins simply speed up the process and turn financing and risk control into code.

Energy and Infrastructure

Why must it be energy?

Because AI has pushed electricity to the center stage of currency, and with the large-scale adoption of AI, training and inference have risen from mathematical problems to electricity problems.

Today's data centers already consume a significant share of global electricity, and the scale of models and service density are still rising.

Large US tech companies are diving into "clean and stable baseload power": signing nuclear power contracts, locking in long-term supply, and pursuing both distributed and storage solutions.

This is not about ESG sentiment, but the physical constraints of traditional energy.

The ceiling for AI is determined by the generator behind the socket.

The next, sharper question is: who can build electricity the fastest, at the largest scale, on time and with quality?

To package and deliver wind turbines, photovoltaics, inverters, transformers, DC transmission, phase adjustment, energy storage, cooling, and integrated parks, and deliver on schedule in unfamiliar geographic and regulatory environments, tests the industrial cluster, supply chain resilience, and engineering "muscle memory."

Over the past decade, highways, railways, hydropower, UHV, and various park projects have been iterated overseas, making the "electricity—engineering—finance" flywheel increasingly smooth.

The most intuitive feeling was when I was doing macro investing at Franklin Templeton in 2014 and on a business trip to Africa: the newly built highway led straight to Nairobi, and Zambia's convention center became a new local landmark overnight.

Engineering teams treated complex terrain simply as a project management issue. You may question capital efficiency, but it is hard to deny this ability to "deliver on time" in complex environments, which is precisely the scarcest part of the "electricity—currency" closed loop.

The capital efficiency of investment may not be the "optimal" in textbooks, but capability is built up over the long term, and this is a moat that cannot be seen on the ledger.

Oil is certainly still on stage, especially in the Middle East—a region that embraces both crypto assets and new settlement experiments.

But in the next decade, the focus of energy will shift more to renewable and "localized" clean electricity.

Hydropower, wind, solar, and energy storage lock value onto geography, and with the added requirements of data sovereignty in various countries, local data centers and local electricity are a natural pair:on one side, electricity becomes computing; on the other, computing becomes services, and settlement is best done on a track that does not need to cross another country's system.

The Implementation of RMB Stablecoin

There are two very practical paths here.

The first is direct settlement for electricity.

Electricity purchase and sale contracts are more compatible with the programmable nature of stablecoins than commodity trade—how much is generated, how much is metered, how much is paid, all is digitized end-to-end, and currency can follow the electricity meter.

Today, there are already electricity fees, O&M fees, and financing leases denominated in RMB; tokenization simply makes accounting faster, financing more flexible, and collateral more composable.

The second is settlement for computing power and model services.

Electricity in the data center becomes "AI output," and enterprises and developers use stablecoins to buy API calls, model tokens, vector storage, and inference time.

Cross-border digital services in many emerging markets have long used USD stablecoins as a "dollar substitute." As more of the supply chain and service side comes from China, an offshore RMB stablecoin becomes a natural second choice.

If this framework still seems abstract, let's return to a case that was once mocked.

In 2021, when I was in charge of global strategy at Jack Mallers' Strike, I helped El Salvador make bitcoin legal tender. At that time, the president proposed using "volcanic geothermal" for mining, turning local resources into globally liquid digital assets.

The process was not perfect, but the direction was right: turning "geographically unique" natural endowments into tradable value units through energy and code.

AI and stablecoins are industrializing this idea.

At the time, "volcano mining" was seen as a joke, but looking back today, using local energy to digitize value seems more like a prototype of the "electricity standard."

The Flywheel of the Second Half of Going Global

Back to the main thread: from oil to electricity, the key to the closed loop is the "recycling" of currency.

In the past, the biggest question about settling energy in RMB was, "What can you buy with the RMB you receive?"

The traditional answer is the RMB offshore pool, dim sum bonds, panda bonds—they work, but the market is thin.

The new answer is more direct: buy electricity, buy computing, buy equipment, buy services.

Your generator sets, inverters, energy storage systems, vehicles, and charging facilities come from China, operations and upgrades come from China, and the software, hardware, and services of data centers come from China, so the "recycling" of foreign exchange reserves no longer needs to switch to US dollars.

Moreover, as "Made in China" goes global more broadly, what you can buy with RMB can meet almost all aspects of life and business needs. We can even abandon white-labeling for overseas brands and become true high-quality direct suppliers.

Of course, this means thatin the "second half" of going global, we need to do more homework on branding and storytelling, but at least the purchasing power and liquidity pool of the currency will naturally grow on the supply side.

The New Competitive Game Among Major Powers

To put the conclusion more bluntly: the winner of the stablecoin war may not be the token with the best audit or the most regulator-friendly, but the currency system most tightly coupled with "low-cost, stable electricity and high-density computing power."

If China advances offshore RMB stablecoins, the real "secret weapon" is not token design, but the ability to deliver wind turbines, photovoltaics, transformers, UHV, and data centers globally, and price the entire set in RMB.

That would be a new monetary order shifting from an "oil anchor" to an "electricity anchor."

Of course, this path is not without noise.

The expansion of nuclear and clean "strong baseload" electricity will be constrained by approvals and supply chains, and it is difficult to achieve overnight in the short term.

And do not underestimate the self-healing ability of the US: if a compliant USD stablecoin framework runs smoothly, and at the same time there is heavy investment in clean, stable electricity, the network effect of the dollar can be further layered on the software side.

In terms of direction, AI has already established electricity as the new constraint; in the face of constraints, payments will follow the lowest-cost path, and currency will follow suit.

If I were to leave readers with one sentence from this article, I would choose this one:

AI makes electricity the "first principle variable," and crypto and stablecoins simply connect this physical variable directly to the monetary system; whoever can most efficiently organize electricity and computing is more qualified to define the next generation of currency interfaces.

About the Author

Charlie previously worked as a macro analyst at the traditional financial giant Franklin Templeton, and has also worked for many years in the payments sector, joining Adyen early and staying through its IPO. He began investing in bitcoin in 2014, and as VP of Strike in 2021, helped El Salvador become the first country to adopt bitcoin as official reserve currency, and was also responsible for bitcoin and stablecoin payment business in Latin America during his time at Strike.