Beijing is charting a pioneering course into the token economy, with a high-level seminar themed "Insights into Beijing's Trillion-Yuan New Opportunities in the Token Economy" recently convened at the Beijing International Big Data Exchange.
At the event, the "2026 Beijing Token Economy Development Observation Report" (hereafter referred to as the Report) was officially released.
Drawing on frontline field research and integrating perspectives from policy direction, industrial capital, and market participants, the Report offers valuable reference points for advancing Beijing's token economy and forging a "Beijing experience."
Market Observation: Token-Based Billing Turns AI into an Inclusive Digital Tool
As the artificial intelligence (AI) industry undergoes rapid iteration, domestic Token invocation volumes have exploded exponentially.
Data from the National Data Administration shows that in early 2024, China's average daily Token invocations stood at 100 billion, and by June 2026, that figure had surpassed 500 trillion.
Behind this surge in invocation volume, a new business model built on Token-based billing is accelerating into formation.
Token was originally an English term in the AI field, and in March 2026, the National Data Administration designated "Ci Yuan" as its official Chinese name, marking a trend toward greater standardization, localization, and maturity in China's AI development.
A Token is the smallest unit of computation when large models process text, code, images, audio, video, and other information, and it is increasingly becoming the unit of measurement, settlement, and statistics for AI services.
Billing AI services by Token is akin to paying for internet usage by data volume or paying electricity bills by kilowatt-hours, allowing data value, computing power strength, and model quality to be quantified.
Field research by Beijing Youth Daily found that Tokens are packaging complex computing power, models, and data into standardized services, with AI capabilities supplied on a metered basis much like water and electricity.
Small and medium-sized enterprises, micro-operators, and even one-person companies (OPCs) can access top-tier large model capabilities by purchasing Token services without building their own computing hardware.
AI has descended from a proprietary technology of a few tech giants to an inclusive digital tool accessible to society at large.
Beijing concentrates more than half of the nation's Token production and resource invocation, which brings major industrial opportunities while also imposing entirely new requirements on Token production, circulation, and application, urgently necessitating strengthened top-level design and systematic cultivation of new pathways in the Token economy.
First-Mover Advantage: Building Token Factories Covering the Full Chain from Production to Distribution
As a trailblazer in Token economy development, Beijing has issued the nation's first provincial-level dedicated Token economy policy, the "Token Economy Ten Measures," systematically constructing Beijing's Token economy industrial development framework while creating a competition arena and testing ground for the industry.
Beijing has also written Tokens into its "15th Five-Year Plan." The "Beijing High-Precision and Advanced Industry Development Plan for the 15th Five-Year Period" proposes enriching model service supply capacity, building a Token settlement system, and creating Token factories that cover the full chain of Token production, distribution, and consumption.
The "Beijing Digital Economy Development Plan for the 15th Five-Year Period" mentions expanding the scale of the Token economy and cultivating new technologies, products, and business formats such as Tokens, software agents, and super economic individuals.
In addition, a series of detailed policy frameworks concerning specific fields and related businesses are being coordinated, from the "Software Eight Measures" to the Yizhuang district-level Token policy, and further to the "Agent Ten Measures," opening up full-chain support for computing power subsidies, Token production, evaluation and distribution, agent cultivation, and OPC entrepreneurship.
The introduction of policies is only a starting point; the key lies in converting policy dividends into tangible industrial development outcomes.
As the city with the greatest concentration and strongest vitality in domestic Token commercialization applications, Beijing holds clear advantages in two core Token domains: AIGC and programming-assisted office work.
AIGC model entities are highly concentrated in Beijing, with downstream formats such as AI short dramas, short videos, advertising, and gaming developing rapidly.
Enterprises such as Zhipu Huazhang and Moonshot AI have outstanding AI programming capabilities, and these two tracks continue to release large-scale Token consumption demand, driving the continuous convergence of Token production and scheduling resources.
Trend Assessment: Beijing's Token Economy Will Evolve Toward "Value Leap"
Combining policy direction, field research by Beijing Youth Daily, and the needs of business entities, the Report predicts that Beijing's Token economy will undergo further profound transformation over the next two to three years, presenting five major trends:
Competition will shift toward "competing on quality and standard-setting authority." In the short term, the market competes on total Token throughput, while in the medium to long term, the core competitive focus will fall on high-quality Token supply, Token cost-effectiveness, and leadership in standards and norms.
Beijing is expected to export nationally replicable Token factory tiered evaluation standards, Token quality assessment standards, and Token measurement and settlement rules, moving from a Token production hub to a high ground for Token rule output.
The share of industry-specific and specialized Token supply will continue to rise, and the industry will differentiate into a batch of dedicated Token factories serving vertical sectors such as education and teaching, industrial manufacturing, biomedicine, and scientific research.
The industry evaluation system will be reformed, no longer simply using average daily Token invocation volume as the sole indicator, but adding metrics such as the proportion of effective Tokens, cost reduction and efficiency gains in the real economy, and paid conversion rates, while billing will also shift from Token consumption volume to value-based billing.
Agents will become the largest Token consumption scenario. Tokens will not be monetized independently, and value realization will rely more on agent applications.
Over the next two years, general-purpose agents and industry-vertical agents will be deployed on a large scale, with TaaS (Token as a Service) evolving toward AaaS (Agent as a Service) and RaaS (Result as a Service) business models, and billing models will gradually explore a shift from invocation volume to business outcome value.
OPCs (one-person companies), as a unique micro-sample of the Token economy, are asset-light and flexibly innovative, with a large number of young entrepreneurs participating in the industry in OPC form. Token measurement, pricing, and trading rules directly determine the survival costs and development space of this group, and the OPC ecosystem will become an important testing ground for evaluating the effectiveness of Beijing's Token industry.
Corporate credit granting must not rely solely on "invocation volume." Financial tools suited to digital asset-light enterprises will continue to improve.
"Token loans and computing power loans" are not short-term financial products; behind them lies an entirely new credit logic for AI digital enterprises: using desensitized Token invocation logs, computing power contracts, and business activity levels as credible operating credentials.
However, credit granting must not be based solely on "invocation volume," and multi-dimensional cross-verification must be established to prevent volume manipulation from creating "false prosperity."
Token supply will move toward cross-regional coordination. Currently, Beijing produces an average of 4 million to 5 million Tokens per kilowatt-hour of electricity, and by 2030, one kilowatt-hour is expected to yield 20 million Tokens.
Behind this lies not only Beijing's multi-dimensional advantages in talent, models, policies, and application ecosystems, but also the boost from regional coordination.
The Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei "Galaxy Computing Corridor" project is accelerating, and regional coordination to aggregate computing power around Beijing will effectively enhance Token supply capacity and reduce per-Token energy consumption and enterprise computing costs.
Standardization and innovative trial-and-error will proceed in parallel. As the Token industry heats up, regulation must keep pace, and a clear distinction must be drawn between "genuine use" and "speculation": supporting real business use while strictly prohibiting speculative trading, especially strictly prohibiting the financialization of Tokens for speculation.
At the same time, a Token security audit mechanism must be established, complaint and verification channels improved, and crackdowns focused on scams such as fake Token packages, so that enterprises put computing power to practical use and users can see their usage clearly.
Of course, regulation and encouragement are not contradictory: only by holding the safety bottom line while tolerating reasonable trial-and-error during technological iteration can exploration space be preserved for new technologies and new models.
Tiered Recommendations: Guiding the Industry from "Competing on Capacity" to "Competing on Quality, Energy Efficiency, and Industry Fit"
The Report proposes tiered recommendations. For government departments, policy publication is only the starting point, and the next stage of the Token industry will focus on implementation details and pilot advancement, with the core being to address the real demands of enterprises.
The Report recommends that Token factory tiered cultivation rules need further refinement, guiding the industry from "competing on capacity" to "competing on quality, energy efficiency, and industry fit," and providing support to Token factories with industry-leading influence.
At the same time, policies should encourage the construction of industry-customized Token production lines so that different grades of Tokens can be clearly identified on trading platforms.
While regulating Token circulation and trading, it is recommended to carry out regular risk warnings, expose fake Token packages and investment speculation scams, and standardize data desensitization and privacy protection requirements.
For enterprises across the industrial chain, finding the right positioning is key. The Report recommends shifting from low-price involution to value creation.
Upstream enterprises in chips, computing power, and data should pay more attention to pragmatic indicators such as "how many high-quality Tokens are stably produced per kilowatt-hour," advance the research, development, and adaptation of domestic computing power, chips, and models, and ensure stable, compliant, and high-quality data supply.
Midstream players—models, Token factories, evaluation, and trading distribution platforms—should accelerate standardized processing and circulation, output auditable Token consumption bills, and distinguish effective inference Tokens, cached Tokens, and padding/idle Tokens.
Token factory enterprises should focus on raising the proportion of effective Tokens, inference quality, and domestic software-hardware adaptation capabilities.
Third-party evaluation institutions should actively participate in local standard development and build neutral Token evaluation toolkits.
Large model companies, cloud service providers, telecom operators, and aggregation platforms should leverage their network and channel advantages to handle Token distribution well, abandon the pure markup model, and transition toward value-added industry solution services.
Downstream agents, vertical industry applications, and OPCs need to achieve value release.
For financial and venture capital institutions, the logic of valuation and credit granting needs to be restructured.
Enterprises in the Token field are characterized by "heavy upfront computing power investment, revenue fluctuating with invocation volume, and a lack of traditional real estate collateral," necessitating exploration of a new financial logic of "computing power as credit, invocation as credential."
The "total invocation volume" indicator can serve as a reference, but key consideration should also be given to indicators such as the proportion of effective Tokens, paying customer revenue, depth of vertical scenario deployment, domestic software-hardware adaptation level, and agent product repurchase rates.
The Report cautions: be vigilant against projects that rely on subsidies and volume manipulation to inflate invocation data.
It also recommends that young developers and OPCs choose vertical niche tracks for entrepreneurship.
Niche industries and niche scenarios, prioritizing the digitalization needs of SMEs, make it easier to form a commercial closed loop; simply acting as a Token agent or distributor offers limited profit space, and value-added services are the core breakthrough point.
Focus: Multi-Party Collaboration Lets the "Token Industry" Empower All Sectors
The AI industry is moving from the era of "building large models" to a new industrialization stage of "using Tokens to create commercial value."
Frontline research by Beijing Youth Daily found that alongside rapid industrial scale expansion, multiple real-world contradictions are also affecting the high-quality development of the Token economy.
First, the production side shows a "heavy capacity, light quality" phenomenon. Building Token factories, increasing computing power, and counting Token invocation volumes are relatively easy, while cultivating industry applications that can sustainably create value takes longer.
The Report's research shows that multiple regions and various types of entities across the country have entered the Token field, but the industry has not yet fully implemented unified tiered standards, and the market has seen "Token idling," ineffective Tokens, and inflated capacity.
Under the same number of invocations, the knowledge density and reasoning capability of Tokens output by different factories vary enormously; some vendors simply pursue Token output quantity while ignoring the actual business utility of Tokens.
Industry consensus predicts that in the next one to two years, the Token industry will face a shakeout, with competition shifting comprehensively from price wars to a value war of "efficiency + security + ecosystem," and entities lacking technological barriers will gradually be eliminated.
Second, the billing "black box" on the evaluation and measurement side needs to be cracked, and unified standards are urgently needed.
This is an industry pain point previously highlighted in Beijing Youth Daily's "Banliang Finance" series: different vendors use inconsistent tokenization criteria, and for the same passage of text, the Token counts produced by different models can differ by more than 50%, directly affecting billing and settlement; there is a lack of unified bill disclosure standards, and ordinary enterprises and developers cannot verify the authenticity of Token consumption.
Measurement rules for multimodal (image, audio, video) Tokens are even more of a blank.
Third-party institutions for Token quality evaluation are weak, and "who evaluates, how to evaluate, and how evaluation results are mutually recognized across platforms" has not yet formed a mature industry consensus.
Third, circulation and pricing mechanisms have not yet taken shape. At present, Token pricing is mainly led by leading large model vendors, lacking sufficient market-based bargaining; mechanisms for cross-entity Token transfer, bulk trading, and secondary scheduling are still in the exploratory stage.
The "computing power-Token" supply-demand mismatch persists over the long term, with computing power scarce during peak periods and idle during troughs, and the cost for small and medium-sized tech innovation enterprises to purchase Tokens remains high.
Fourth, the traditional financing system does not match the business model of Token enterprises. Some places, including Beijing, have launched pilot "Token loans and computing power loans," but current product coverage, risk control models, and trusted data integration mechanisms still need iterative improvement, especially to avoid the risk of volume-manipulation bubbles from credit granting based solely on Token invocation volume.
Fifth, youth innovation vitality is abundant, but entry barriers and risks coexist. Beijing's universities are rich in AI professional resources, and young developers and OPCs are rising rapidly, making them an important innovative force in the Token economy.
However, the procurement cost of computing power and Tokens is high, industry guidance is lacking, and compliance awareness is insufficient; at the same time, the market has bred Token speculation, fake Token packages, and investment scams, with some unscrupulous merchants peddling fake Token products and using the Token concept to carry out wealth management investment fraud, posing risks to young entrepreneurs and ordinary users.
Currently, AIGC, programming-assisted office work, and Token going global have become the three main revenue areas of Beijing's Token economy.
But it must also be noted that Token economy development is still in its early stages, and in practice it still faces many real-world bottlenecks and risk challenges, with the supporting policy guarantee system not yet fully developed.
From a technical term and policy concept to an economic form with practical significance, Beijing's Token economy still has a long road ahead.
The core measure of the industry is "how much actual value Tokens create." This requires multi-party collaboration among government, enterprises, research institutions, capital, and young innovators to close the policy implementation loop and resolve industrial bottlenecks in measurement, evaluation, financing, and security, so that Beijing's "Token industry" can truly empower all sectors and export Beijing experience for the high-quality development of the nation's AI industry.
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