Analysis of the Coin-Stock Linkage Strategy Part Five: How Coin-Stock Linkage Drives the Industrial Internet

Author: Zhang Feng

Traditional industrial internet focuses on optimizing internal processes and supply chain collaboration within enterprises by using technologies such as big data, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence. However, its core bottleneck lies in the fact that while data can be shared, assets find it difficult to achieve efficient and trustworthy free circulation. The flow of value still relies on traditional, centralized financial infrastructure, which faces issues such as high friction, low efficiency, and high barriers to entry.

The concept of "coin-stock linkage," which seems to belong to the financial market, actually provides us with a key to unlock the value circulation dilemma of the industrial internet. Its essence is not merely the speculative linkage between stock prices and coin prices, but rather a digital revolution of assets that starts from the financial end and ultimately sweeps through the entire industrial ecosystem. It will powerfully drive the development of the industrial internet into deeper and broader dimensions from the asset side.

1. The essence of industrial internet is asset on-chain and intelligent circulation

To understand the far-reaching significance of the linkage between cryptocurrencies and stocks, one must first re-examine the ultimate goals of the industrial internet. The deep core of the industrial internet is to achieve the digitization, networking, and intelligence of internal and external business demands within the industry. The core bottleneck and final destination of this process are the confirmation of asset rights, registration, circulation, and transaction. Here, "assets" is a broad concept that goes beyond physical assets such as factories and equipment, and also includes:

Intellectual Property: Patents, trademarks, copyrights, designs, etc.

Goods and Merchandise: Physical goods at various stages of production, logistics, and warehousing.

Services and Capacity: Future computable services, logistics capacity, and advertisement placements that can be reserved.

Data Assets: Business operation data, user profiles, supply chain data, etc.

Financial Assets: Accounts receivable, orders, claims, etc.

Under the traditional model, the circulation of these assets faces huge challenges: difficulty in rights confirmation, high verification costs, cumbersome transaction processes, and insufficient liquidity. Blockchain technology provides a "trust machine" and "value protocol" for the industrial internet. The deepening of the industrial internet essentially involves "on-chaining" various types of assets in different forms, transforming them into digital assets:

Security Token: Represents equity, debt, or fund shares, enjoying financial rights such as dividends and voting. This is the mapping of the "stock" in the "coin-stock linkage" on the blockchain.

Commodity Token or Utility Token: Represents ownership or rights to profits of physical goods, such as one ton of copper or one barrel of crude oil.

Payment Token: Used within a specific ecosystem to pay service fees, purchase goods, or unlock specific features.

NFT (Non-Fungible Token): Represents unique assets such as individual artworks, digital collectibles, property rights, specific orders, etc.

By going on-chain, assets have achieved digital twinning and even promote digital nativeness, possessing characteristics such as programmability, divisibility, high liquidity, and 24/7 global trading. The industrial internet has thus transcended information interconnection, elevating to value interconnection, forming a value network based on smart contracts where assets can be freely and intelligently traded.

2. The Essence of Coin-Stock Linkage: On-Chain Value Linkage of Enterprise Ecological Assets

"Coin-stock linkage" is usually intuitively understood as the correlation between the prices of related tokens (usually utility tokens) and the stock prices of the company through participation in cryptocurrency businesses. However, this is merely a superficial phenomenon. The deeper essence is: A company (especially platform-type or ecosystem-type companies) tokenizes its core value units within its ecosystem and builds a new value system on the blockchain that complements and drives the existing equity value system.

On one hand, stock on the blockchain: This is the most direct linkage. Companies can issue a portion of their equity in the form of security tokens (STO) on compliant blockchain exchanges. This makes stock trading more efficient, transparent, and able to reach a broader global base of investors.

On the other hand, ecological rights on the chain: This is the more imaginative part. For example: an e-commerce platform can issue platform tokens for paying fees, enjoying discounts, participating in governance, and using part of the platform's profits to buy back and destroy the tokens, linking their value to the platform's performance; a gaming company can issue its in-game virtual assets (items, land) as NFTs, while game tokens serve as the circulating medium in the ecological economic system. The success of the company is reflected in the prosperity of the ecology, which in turn drives the value of tokens and NFTs to rise; a manufacturing enterprise can tokenize its future production capacity or services, pre-sell them, and lock in demand.

The "coin-stock linkage" is no longer the transmission of price fluctuations between two isolated markets, but rather the intrinsic linkage of asset values on different levels within the same enterprise ecosystem. Equity (on-chain or off-chain) represents the claim to ownership of the enterprise and future cash flows, while ecological tokens represent the rights and utilities of using its products, services, and network. Together, they form a complete puzzle of enterprise value. The widespread use and appreciation of ecological tokens will enhance the fundamental aspects and profitability of the enterprise, thereby driving up stock prices; conversely, the brand effect and financial strength brought by rising stock prices can feed back into ecological construction and promote token applications. This creates a virtuous cycle of asset value between "on-chain and off-chain."

3. Development Path: The Wave of Asset On-Chain from Financial Side to Industrial Side

The true development of the coin-stock linkage will never remain at the level of financial speculation. It will follow a clear path of gradually penetrating from the financial end to the industrial end, ultimately leading to a mature, Web3-based industrial internet.

Phase One: Financial Assets First, Exploring Compliance Models. This phase starts with the on-chain transformation of "stocks." Early participants are mostly tech companies, financial institutions, and venture capitalists seeking innovative financing efficiency. The core tasks of this phase are to establish a compliance framework, validate technological feasibility, and foster market awareness. At this time, "linkage" is more conceptual and serves as a supplementary experiment to the traditional capital markets.

Phase Two: The Rise of Ecological Tokens to Activate User Networks. As the regulatory environment gradually clarifies and technological infrastructure improves, more companies begin to issue utility tokens or community governance tokens that are not classified as securities. These tokens are closely tied to their core business, aimed at incentivizing user participation, building communities, and lubricating internal economic systems. For example, social platforms reward content creators, and sharing economy platforms incentivize both supply and demand sides. In this phase, the主体 of value creation expands from capital providers to a wide range of ecological participants, and the value of "coins" begins to genuinely correlate with the activity level of the ecosystem, resulting in a more substantive linkage with the value of "stocks."

Phase Three: Full Asset Tokenization on the Blockchain, Building an Industrial Value Internet. This is a mature stage of development. Based on the previous two phases, enterprises will tokenize a broader range of industrial assets—ranging from raw materials, orders, accounts receivable to data and intellectual property. Smart contracts will automatically execute complex business logic (such as automatic settlement in supply chain finance and automatic distribution of copyright revenues). The company's balance sheet will evolve into a dynamic "digital asset balance sheet" composed of various tokens. At this point, the "coin" in "coin-stock linkage" has generalized into an "asset token system" for the entire enterprise and even the industrial chain. Stocks are merely a fundamental equity certificate within this vast token economic ecosystem. The industrial internet ultimately realizes the leap from "information internet" to "value internet," becoming an open, transparent, and composable Web3 network.

4. Multiple Risk Challenges

The development process of this grand blueprint will not be smooth sailing; it is driven by multiple factors and also faces severe challenges.

Technical risks, including vulnerabilities in smart contracts, attacks on blockchain networks, loss of private keys, and other security issues remain the sword of Damocles hanging over our heads. The stability and security of the system are the lifelines.

Compliance and regulatory challenges are the biggest sources of uncertainty. How to define the legal attributes of tokens (are they securities, commodities, or utility tokens)? How to cope with the fragmentation of global regulation? How to implement anti-money laundering (AML) and know your customer (KYC)? Solving these issues requires long-term and in-depth communication and collaboration between enterprises and regulatory agencies.

Market and Financial Risks, the on-chain asset market is still immature and may face issues such as insufficient liquidity, severe price fluctuations, and market manipulation. How to apply the mature experience of traditional financial risk management in a decentralized environment is a new topic.

Cognitive and Talent Gap, Traditional industry leaders have a limited understanding of Web3, and there is an extreme scarcity of composite talents who possess industry knowledge, financial experience, and blockchain technology skills, which will become a constraint on the speed of transformation.

Challenges of Integrating Business Models, not all enterprises are suitable for issuing tokens. Designing a reasonable and sustainable token economic model that organically integrates with existing business models rather than conflicting with them is a tremendous test of a company's innovation capability.

The linkage between currency and stocks is by no means a brief capital game, but rather a profound prelude to a transformation that begins in finance and ends in industry. It reveals that asset tokenization is an inevitable path for the deep development of the industrial internet. By tokenizing the core value units within the enterprise ecosystem—from financial rights to product services—we are building a value collaboration network that is more efficient, fairer, and more open than the current internet.

This process is destined to be gradual and filled with challenges, but the direction it represents is clear. The true industrial internet we envision—namely the Web3-based global value internet—will only arrive when assets can flow seamlessly and be traded intelligently across the globe, just like information. In the future, the connection between cryptocurrencies and stocks will no longer be a concept that needs to be deliberately emphasized, but rather an underlying rule that naturally emerges and comes to fruition in that new economic ecosystem.