Token Naming Wars: Who's Competing for the "Minting Rights" of the AI Era?

Author: Curry, Deep Tide TechFlow

Recently, you may have noticed one thing: Everyone is starting to discuss what to call the Token.

Professor Yang Bin from Tsinghua University published an article titled “Deciding the Chinese Translation of Token Is Urgent”; related translation questions on Zhihu have garnered 250,000 views, and the comment section is full of ideas.

In the past two or three years, the domestic AI community has been directly using the word Token without issue. Why is there suddenly a need for a Chinese name?

The direct reason might be that after this year’s Spring Festival, ordinary people first realized that Token costs money.

OpenClaw has turned AI from chatting into work, with a single task burning through tens of thousands of Tokens, and bills skyrocketing; cloud service providers are also announcing price hikes, with Tokens as the billing unit.

At the same time, Token has started appearing in places where it previously shouldn’t have.

At GTC, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said Silicon Valley already asks during interviews, “How many Tokens can I get in this job,” and he suggested including Tokens in engineers’ compensation;

OpenAI founder Sam Altman went even further, believing that Tokens will replace universal basic income, and everyone will receive not money, but computing power.

Data from the National Bureau of Statistics shows that China’s daily Token consumption rose from 100 billion at the start of 2024 to over 40 trillion by September 2025, reaching 180 trillion in February this year. The People’s Daily published an article early this year titled “A Casual Talk on Morphemes,” explaining what this term means.

As a technical term, once it enters cloud service bills, recruitment packages, and official statistics, it can no longer be called by its English name.

The question is, what should it be called?

If this were just a translation issue, there was already an answer back in 2021. The academic community in China assigned a name to Token: “Morpheme.”

But no one paid attention because, at that time, Token was still just an internal term within the tech circle.

Now, it’s different.

The word Token itself is a universal container. Previously, people in the crypto world called it a “token,” security experts called it a “token,” and AI researchers called it a “morpheme.” The same English word, depending on how it’s translated into Chinese, belongs to different domains.

Thus, a naming contest for Token has begun.

Business needs discourse rights

How to translate a word is usually a linguist’s job. But this time, almost no linguists are involved in the naming process.

The most prominent name right now is “ZhiYuan” (智元).

The most active promoter is an AI media called “XinZhiYuan” (新智元). If the Chinese name for Token is set as “ZhiYuan,” this company’s brand name overlaps with the industry’s core terminology, effectively giving every article discussing Token free advertising for them.

Their promotional article ends honestly: “We suggest translating Token as the industry’s new consensus: ZhiYuan, leaving the ‘new’ character to us.”

According to the same article, Wang Xiaochuan, founder of Baichuan Intelligence, commented: “Calling it ZhiYuan is quite good.”

He works on large models, so calling Token ZhiYuan makes sense. Instead of a billing unit, each computation output becomes a “basic unit of intelligence.”

Selling Tokens is selling traffic; selling ZhiYuan is selling intelligence. The valuation stories are entirely different.

Professor Yang Bin from Tsinghua University proposed “MoYuan” (模元), where “Mo” (model) corresponds to the model. Whoever owns the large model controls the production of “MoYuan.” Naming it in the model direction shifts pricing power to the model companies.

Some also advocate for “FuYuan” (符元), returning to the fundamental computer science definition: a Token is a symbol processing unit, unrelated to intelligence or models.

Technically the cleanest, but the proposer is an independent tech author without company backing or capital support. In this discussion, they have almost no voice.

The direction of the name influences the industry narrative, and money flows accordingly.

A distant example: when Facebook rebranded as Meta, “metaverse” transformed from a sci-fi concept into a valuation story for a company; a more recent example: China consumes 180 trillion Tokens daily, the world’s largest, but what this word is called, how to define it, and who defines it, remain unresolved…

The world’s largest Token-consuming country hasn’t even decided what to call what it consumes.

But, in fact, this term already has a Chinese name.

In 2021, Professor Qiu Xipeng from Fudan University translated Token as “Ciyuan” (词元), which was accepted by academia and included in textbooks. At that time, no one discussed this because Token was still worthless.

Now, Token is valuable.

It is the billing unit for cloud services, the revenue source for large model companies, and a core indicator for measuring the AI industry scale at the national level. Media, industry leaders, and professors have all come forward, each with their preferred name and reasoning.

Translation has never been the problem. The real question is: when did this word start to be worth money?

Jensen Huang did not participate in the Chinese naming discussion at GTC. He did something simpler: he raised a champion belt with “Token King” printed on it, and announced that data centers are Token factories.

Who produces Tokens, who defines Tokens. The name doesn’t matter to him.

Token, land grabbing, and coin minting

So, what truly matters is not which translation is better.

After “calorie” was established, the entire food industry’s pricing, labeling, and regulatory systems were built around it. After “traffic” was defined in China’s telecom industry, operators billed, competed, and designed packages based on traffic, and the entire business model revolved around these two words for over a decade.

Token is now following the same path.

It has become the billing unit for cloud services, the revenue metric for large model companies, and a core indicator for national AI industry measurement. Venture capitalists are even discussing whether investment funds can be directly paid in Tokens.

Once a word becomes a measure of money, naming it is no longer translation — it’s minting.

Calling it “ZhiYuan” grants the minting rights to AI narratives; whoever tells the story of intelligence benefits. Calling it “MoYuan” grants the minting rights to model companies; whoever owns large models can print money. Calling it “FuYuan” returns minting rights to the technology itself, but technology cannot speak for itself.

The “Ciyuan” term from academia in 2021 was ignored not because of poor translation, but because that “coin” was not yet valuable.

Now that it’s valuable, everyone wants to carve their own name on it.