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 industry chain collaboration through 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 struggle to achieve efficient and trustworthy free circulation. The flow of value still relies on traditional, centralized financial infrastructure, which presents 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, provides us with a key to unlock the value circulation difficulties of the industrial internet. Its essence is not merely a simple speculation on the linkage between stock prices and coin prices, but a digital asset revolution that begins at the financial end and ultimately sweeps across the entire industrial ecosystem. It will vigorously promote the development of the industrial internet towards 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 cryptocurrency and stocks, it is essential to revisit the ultimate goal of the industrial internet. The deep core of the industrial internet is to achieve the digitization, networking, and intelligence of business needs both inside and outside the industry. The core bottleneck and final destination of this process are the confirmation, registration, circulation, and trading of assets. 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 products in various stages such as production, logistics, and warehousing.

Services and capacity: Future computing services, logistics capacity, advertising slots, and other bookable rights.

Data assets: business operation data, user profiles, supply chain data, etc.

Financial assets: accounts receivable, orders, claims, etc.

In the traditional model, the circulation of these assets faces huge challenges: difficulties in rights confirmation, high verification costs, complicated transaction processes, and insufficient liquidity. Blockchain technology provides the "trust machine" and "value agreement" for the industrial internet. The deepening of the industrial internet essentially involves "putting on chain" 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 "stock" mapping on the chain in "Coin-Stock Linkage."

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

Payment Token: Used within a specific ecosystem for paying service fees, purchasing goods, or unlocking specific features.

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

By being on-chain, assets have achieved digital twins and even promoted digital native characteristics, providing 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.

II. The Essence of Coin-Stock Linkage: On-chain Value Linkage of Enterprise Ecological Assets

"Crypto-stock linkage" is usually intuitively understood as the correlation between the prices of related tokens (usually utility tokens) and the company's stock price through participation in crypto business. However, this is just a superficial phenomenon. The deeper essence is that a company (especially platform-based and ecosystem-based companies) tokenizes its core value units within its ecosystem and builds a new value system on the blockchain that complements and mutually drives the original equity value system.

On one hand, stock on the chain: This is the most direct linkage. Companies can issue part 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 wider global pool 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 coins for paying transaction fees, enjoying discounts, and participating in governance, and use a portion of the platform's profits to repurchase and destroy these tokens, linking their value to the platform's performance; a gaming company can issue its in-game virtual assets (items, land) as NFTs, while the game tokens serve as the circulating medium within the ecological economic system. The success of the company is reflected in the prosperity of the ecosystem, which in turn drives the value of the tokens and NFTs upward; a manufacturing enterprise can tokenize its future production capacity or services, pre-sell them, and lock in demand.

"The linkage between cryptocurrency and stock market is no longer a transmission of price fluctuations between two isolated markets, but rather an intrinsic connection of the value of different levels of on-chain assets within the same corporate ecosystem. Equity (on-chain or off-chain) represents a claim to ownership of the enterprise and future cash flows, while ecological tokens represent the rights and utilities of using its products, services, and networks. Together, they form a complete picture of the enterprise's value. The widespread use and appreciation of ecological tokens will enhance the fundamental value and profitability of the enterprise, thereby driving up the stock price; conversely, the brand effect and financial strength resulting from the rise in stock price 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 End to Industrial End

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

Phase One: Financial assets take the lead, exploring compliance models. This phase begins with the on-chainization of "stocks." Early participants are mostly technology companies, financial institutions, and venture capitalists seeking innovative financing efficiency. The core task of this phase is to establish a compliance framework, verify technical feasibility, and cultivate market awareness. At this time, "linkage" is more conceptual and serves as a supplementary experiment to traditional capital markets.

Phase Two: The Rise of Ecological Tokens, Activating User Networks. As the regulatory environment gradually clarifies and technological infrastructure improves, more enterprises begin to issue utility tokens or community governance tokens that are not classified as securities. These tokens are closely tied to their core business, used to incentivize user participation, build communities, and lubricate internal economic systems. For example, social platforms reward content creators, while sharing economy platforms incentivize both supply and demand sides. In this phase, the entities creating value expand from capital providers to a broader range of ecological participants, and the value of "coins" begins to genuinely correlate with ecological activity, leading to a more substantive connection with the value of "stocks."

Stage Three: Full-factor assets on-chain, building an industrial value Internet. This is the mature stage of development. Based on the first two stages, enterprises will tokenize a wider range of industrial assets—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 balance sheet of enterprises 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 just a basic equity certificate within this vast token economic ecosystem. The industrial Internet ultimately achieves a 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, and security issues such as the loss of private keys, remain the sword of Damocles hanging over us. The stability and security of the system are a lifeline.

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 address 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 there may be issues such as insufficient liquidity, severe price volatility, and market manipulation. How to apply the mature experience of traditional financial risk management in a decentralized environment is a new topic.

The understanding of Web3 among traditional industry leaders is still superficial, and there is a severe shortage of compound talents who possess industry knowledge, financial experience, and blockchain technology, which will become a limiting factor in the speed of transformation.

The challenge of integrating business models means that not all companies 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 capabilities.

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

This process is destined to be gradual and full of challenges, but the direction it represents is clear. The true industrial internet we envision—a global value internet based on Web3—will only arrive when assets can flow and trade intelligently across the globe like information. In the future, the linkage between coins and stocks will no longer be a concept that needs to be deliberately emphasized, but rather a natural and inevitable underlying rule of that new economic ecosystem.