Galaxy Securities: Tokens Become the Value Anchor of the Intelligent Era; It Is Recommended to Position Around Core AI Industry Beneficiary Segments
Tokens have become the core unit of value in the intelligent era, serving as the standard settlement measure across the AI industry while surging glob
Analysis
The claim that tokens have become the "value anchor" of the intelligent age isn't just an observation; it's a declaration of a new economic reality, and one that warrants a healthy dose of skepticism alongside its excitement. A recent report from Galaxy Securities frames the token as the standardized settlement unit of the AI industry, with exploding global demand poised to rebuild media production from the ground up. On the surface, this is correct. We are indeed moving toward an economy where computational effort—quantified in tokens—is the fundamental currency. But to stop there is to miss the far more turbulent and transformative undercurrents at play.
Let's be blunt: calling a token a "value anchor" is a clever euphemism for what it really is—a metered utility. We are monetizing inference, not magic. Every time you ask an AI to write an email, generate an image, or summarize a report, you are running a meter. The value isn't in the token itself, which is a meaningless string of numbers in isolation, but in the colossal, capital-intensive machinery required to produce it—the data centers, the energy grids, the billions of dollars in GPU clusters. The "token economy" is less a new paradigm and more an acknowledgment that we've successfully packaged and commodified the output of this immense infrastructure. It's the cloud computing model's ultimate, granular evolution. The true "value anchor" isn't the token; it's the silicon, the power, and the proprietary algorithms that transmute electricity into utility.
The report’s projection of tokens reconstructing the media industry is where the utopianism gets a reality check. Yes, AIGC tools promise near-infinite supply of content. But infinite supply, as any economist will tell you, leads to one inevitable outcome: the collapse of marginal cost and a brutal competition for attention. The industry won't just be "reconstructed"; it will be atomized. The barrier to creation vanishes, which is fantastic for individual expression but catastrophic for the traditional value chain built on scarcity and editorial curation. We're not heading for a simple "prosperity of the content industry." We're hurtling toward a chaotic, hyper-competitive landscape where the primary struggle is no longer for production, but for discovery and trust. The token economy may power the creation, but it does nothing to solve the existential crisis of what makes content valuable when everyone can make it.
This brings us to the investment recommendations, which feel as generic as they are predictable. "Focus on internet giants with AI layouts," "leading AI video tool companies," "head companies benefiting from AI applications," "iterative large model vendors." This is the equivalent of telling someone in the 1850s to invest in "companies involved in railroads." It’s directionally correct but analytically lazy. The real, incisive bet isn't just on who has the most GPUs or the shiniest video tool. It's on who can solve the bottleneck problems in this token-based economy.
First, that’s the companies tackling efficiency. Tokenization's dirty secret is its voracious appetite for energy and compute. The future leaders won’t just be the ones who can produce tokens, but who can do so with radically lower cost and environmental impact. Innovations in model architecture, inference optimization, and custom silicon are where the next moat will be dug. Second, the real winners will be the platform architects. In a world of infinite content, value accrues to the interfaces and distribution networks that can reliably connect tokens to human attention and commercial intent. The "AI application" layer is less about the raw generation and more about the intelligent orchestration of it within a trusted ecosystem. Finally, ignore the hype around any single "killer app." The transformative power is in the workflow integration—the seamless embedding of token-based generation into the drudgery of office work, design, and software development. The company that makes AI a invisible, indispensable utility for a billion knowledge workers will capture more value than the one with the flashiest demo.
So, while the token-as-settlement-unit model is a foundational shift, let's not be dazzled by the financial mechanics. It's a billing system. The profound change isn't economic; it's infrastructural and cultural. We are witnessing the birth of a new utility, as transformative and as mundane as electricity. The media industry won't be "rebuilt" so much as flooded, forcing a desperate search for new forms of value that AI cannot replicate: authenticity, curation, human connection, and verified truth. The smart money isn't just following the tokens; it's watching where the real constraints lie—in energy, in efficiency, in trust, and in the unsexy, hard problems of making this new utility reliable, efficient, and integrated into the fabric of real work. The token economy is here, but its winners will be decided in the engine rooms, not just the ledgers.
Disclaimer: The above content is generated by AI and is for reference only.