For stock market insights, rely on authoritative, professional, timely, and comprehensive analyst research to uncover potential thematic opportunities. On November 13, the Artificial Intelligence (Robotics) Administration of Longgang District, Shenzhen, and EY jointly launched an innovation initiative for token economy statistics and governance, with the "Token Economy and Token Index Research Report" released at the same time.
The two parties are using Longgang as the first comprehensive verification scenario to promote the transformation of tokens from billing records of intelligent services into comparable and verifiable public statistical data, marking the starting point of the world's first urban district token index in Longgang. It is understood that this is expected to explore and establish a system for statistics, monitoring, and governance for the rapidly exploding token economy.
Currently, a new round of technological revolution and industrial transformation is accelerating. Artificial intelligence is moving from technological breakthroughs to large-scale application, becoming an important engine for developing new quality productive forces. As the basic unit for pricing and settlement of intelligent services, tokens are becoming the "unit of account" for the intelligent economy. According to the National Data Administration and public reports, China's average daily token calls jumped from about 100 billion in early 2024 to over 500 trillion by June 2026, an increase of about 5,000 times in two and a half years. The steeper the growth curve, the clearer the measurement gap: data is scattered, standards are inconsistent, quantity does not equal quality, and consumption does not equal value. How to aggregate the "quantity" of tokens, how to compare their "quality," and how to measure their "value" still lack a universally recognized statistical framework. The intelligent economy needs a ruler.
Bi Shunjie, Managing Partner of EY Greater China, stated: "Fully implementing the 'AI Plus' initiative requires not only seeing technological breakthroughs but also calculating development results clearly. Weights and measures are the cornerstone of economic operation, and tokens are becoming the unit of account for the intelligent economy. However, to turn them from a billing record into public statistics requires unified accounts, transparent standards, and verifiable methods. It is not that tokens lack data; the real question is whether scattered call records can become reliable public statistics. Making numbers measurable, verifiable, and trustworthy is EY's long-standing professional expertise. Extending this capability from financial measurement to intelligent measurement, and providing scientific, unified, and verifiable measurement methods for the token economy, is exactly what a professional service organization should do to support the development of the intelligent economy."
Longgang is building Guangdong Province's only provincial-level pilot zone named after "AI and Robotics Application Reform," and has issued the "Action Plan for Accelerating the Development of the Token Economy in Longgang District, Shenzhen (2026-2028)," incorporating "measurement" into the full-chain deployment of the token economy. In this collaboration, the Longgang District AI (Robotics) Administration takes the lead in coordination, providing real application scenarios across four ends: government affairs, enterprises, residents, and ecology. EY leverages its professional accumulation in statistical measurement and attestation to participate in research on account design, statistical standards, calibration methods, and publication rules.
The two parties have built a verifiable token measurement system around "quantity, quality, and value": for quantity measurement, data is aggregated by real users across the four ends of government affairs, enterprises, residents, and ecology, with actual records prioritized; where measured data is lacking, estimates are supplemented by computing power inference, cost, and account records, and cross-verified with multi-source information. For quality to be measured accurately, "Effective Tokens" (ETU) are proposed, calibrated by model, scenario, and task, so that tokens from different sources stand on the same ruler. For value to be calculated clearly, human-machine controlled experiments measure the labor time replaceable per unit token and convert it into labor cost equivalents.
Relying on this system, Longgang has achieved three global firsts: the world's first urban district token index, the world's first integrated "quality-value" measurement practice for urban district tokens, and the world's first monitoring, governance, and continuous publication system based on token accounts. Alongside the index, a "map, platform, and system" are also launched: the urban district intelligent economic activity map answers "who is using tokens, where, and for what," the Longgang token monitoring and governance platform organizes the data foundation by "source, flow, use, and measurement," and monthly monitoring, quarterly reports, and annual reviews form a continuous publication mechanism. A single measurement thus grows into a continuously operating urban statistical infrastructure.
Looking ahead, this method is expected to expand from urban districts to the entire city and province, conduct cross-regional comparison and mutual recognition of standards in the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area, and gradually extend to industry and enterprise levels, providing a replicable and promotable path for national intelligent economy statistical monitoring, promoting tokens as a new production factor that can be produced, measured, traded, and governed, and contributing Chinese solutions to global intelligent economy measurement.
Relevant heads of EY stated that in the future, the firm will continue to leverage its professional advantages to help the national "AI Plus" initiative go deeper and more substantive.
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