Written by: KarenZ , Foresight News

Tianya is back.

On June 1, 2026, Tianya Community, which had been offline for three years, officially resumed access. For many long-time users, this was not just the restart of an ordinary website, but rather like a bygone era suddenly illuminating itself.

The place that once housed countless viral posts, gossip, long articles, debates, and late-night stories has reappeared on the screen. Tianya Community is initially restoring access to some of its most popular posts; interactive functions such as login, posting, and private messaging will be gradually restored according to data migration and compliance progress.

However, unlike what many people imagined as a "return of youth," this time, the first thing brought to the forefront for Tianya's return was not just old posts and memories, but also the "New Tianya Founding Member Gift Pack" priced at 1999 yuan, which had already been on sale.

A Chinese forum founded in 1999 is telling its reboot story with a digital collectible membership package priced at 1999 yuan. This in itself is very much in line with Tianya (a popular Chinese online forum), and also very relevant to the present.

Digital badges have become the ticket, cramming in ideas of governance, distribution, and equity.

There is another key entity here: Chengdu Tianyake Network Technology Co., Ltd.

According to Tianya Community's open letter on February 9, Chengdu Tianya Ke Network Technology Co., Ltd., the new investment entity established in 2024, is the core force behind the restart of the Tianya Community platform and the construction of the new Tianya.

The New Tianya Plan includes the Tianya Ke Network Platform (a global travel and fashion consumption social platform) which is currently being launched, which integrates online and offline resources; Tianya Community; and Overseas Tianya (decentralized community governance and IP copyright digital asset trading) based on the Web3.0 platform.

The Tianya Ke member store page shows that this gift pack is limited to 9,999 units and includes benefits such as a Tianya Restarter digital badge, a Tianya Ke premium VIP member gift box, 10 years of free access to the official Tianya Divine Post paid section, Tianya Yuan Space, 10 years of member discounts, and 1,999 Tianya Gold Beans.

According to Tianya Ke's announcement on May 31, the "Tianya Restarter Digital Badge" has been minted on AntChain. It is a digital badge that combines identity authentication, honor display, and commemorative features. The badge supports compliant transfer and is limited to three transfers within one year. Transfers must be completed through a nationally compliant cultural property rights exchange or an officially designated compliant platform.

More notably, the announcement linked this badge to a whole set of "New Tianya Core Rights".

The first is governance rights. Founding members who hold badges are defined as "basic nodes" of New Tianya. They can participate in the formulation and modification of New Tianya's domestic and international community rules, submit suggestions for platform function optimization, ecosystem construction, and future development, and earn New Tianya interactive points rewards by participating in governance and making contributions.

This sounds like a governance narrative common in Web3 communities: identity credentials, rule voting, contribution incentives, and points rewards are all placed within the same rights framework.

Secondly, there are offline space benefits. The announcement states that founding members will have priority to become managers or partners of Tianya Ke's chain of social spaces in cities around the world. In other words, Tianya wants to transform the user relationships from the forum era into cultural tourism, social spaces, and local consumption networks.

Thirdly, there are e-commerce distribution rights. Tianya Ke's membership-based e-commerce focuses on cultural and tourism products. Founding members who hold badges can have priority to become "Good Product Recommendation Officers" and "Good Product Marketing Officers" in the member store, recommending global good products and cultural and tourism routes on the supply chain side. They can also earn Tianya Gold Beans through product promotion and distribution.

This layer is very close to the logic of community e-commerce: the identity recognition of old users is further guided towards recommendations, marketing, distribution and points incentives.

Fourthly, there is the equity-related channel. The announcement also states that founding members who already hold a specified number of badges and qualified investors who have passed the eligibility review can voluntarily apply to participate in a special limited partnership managed by the licensed private fund manager, Hainan Shiyuan Tongda Private Equity Fund Management Co., Ltd., and have priority in indirectly investing in Xintianya's equity.

It's crucial to carefully read the terms and conditions: it requires a "specified number of badges," "qualified investor" status, and passing the relevant audit. It's not like an ordinary user who simply buys a 1999 yuan package and immediately receives equity.

This rights and benefits list is very good at storytelling. Governance rights are responsible for creating a sense of ownership, managers and partners are responsible for realizing offline entrepreneurial ideas, product recommendation officers and marketing officers are responsible for introducing e-commerce distribution, and equity channels are responsible for raising future expectations.

Putting these terms together, it's hard not to take a second look: digital badge, limited edition, founding members, numbered, metaspace, exclusive rights, consumption scenarios, governance, and equity channels. It packages a digital collectible into a comprehensive gateway to community identity, consumer rights, commercial roles, and capital imagination.

The more detailed the rights and interests are, the more specific the problems become.

Governance, distribution, and equity are all in place, but the answer is still not strong enough.

As mentioned earlier, the announcement has outlined the general scope of governance authority. The real questions that need to be asked are how this governance system will operate. For example, which matters will enter the voting process, and which are merely suggestions? What does the formulation and modification of community rules include? Are there key issues such as creator revenue distribution and digital asset transfer rules?

Implementation is equally crucial. Once a vote is passed, is the platform obligated to implement it? How should the implementation cycle, results disclosure, objection handling, and review mechanisms be designed? How are interactive points rewards calculated? Without publicly available details, governance rights easily remain merely a matter of "participation," rather than a truly effective system that constrains the platform, protects users, and allocates responsibility.

The distribution rules for "Good Product Recommendation Officers" and "Good Product Marketing Officers" also need to be more transparent. How are Tianya Gold Beans obtained, redeemed, and how has their scope of application changed?

Equity transfers also require caution. Once expectations are inflated, subsequent disclosures must be more comprehensive. The specified number of shares, how the valuation is determined, the exit mechanism, and whether risk warnings are sufficient—these cannot be automatically filled by sentimentality.

A platform that has been shut down for years, desperately needs cash flow, and urgently needs to prove it still has a user base, is trying every possible way to save itself. Tianya is using Web3 language to repackage a traditional internet-style membership self-rescue.

Digital badges here are more like a self-rescue tool. They compress identity, commemoration, consumer rights, governance narratives, distribution roles, and equity imagination into one, creating a very complete "new Tianya" portal. But precisely because it's so packed in, its formality clearly outweighs its substance.

At the Web3 level, the truly valuable aspects are ownership confirmation, transparency, profit sharing, and governance.

• Ownership confirmation means that users know who owns their content.
• Transparency means that users know where the money comes from and where it goes.
• Revenue sharing is a way for creators and content contributors to avoid forever being free resources.
• Governance means that the so-called "co-builders" are not just consumers, but those who can truly participate in community rules and future direction.

From the perspective of community revitalization, what can truly save Tianya may not be digital collections, but rather three more fundamental things:

• Can the content be retrieved?
• Will he be able to come back?
• Can trust be restored?

If these foundations aren't established, no matter how many digital badges or metaspaces are added, it may only be a short-term recovery. Of course, for an established platform, there's still a chance if they're willing to try.

Tianya didn't just start trying Web3 today.

Tianya's interest in Web3, the metaverse, and digital collectibles didn't just emerge in 2026.

In July 2022, Tianya Community released the "Tianya Virtual World White Paper 1.0," announcing the advancement of the "Tianya Virtual World" metaverse platform and the issuance of "Tianya Yuanzuan." The initial concept was that users could integrate content produced on the Tianya Community and their personal data into "Yuanzuan." Each Yuanzuan had a unique identification number, could be transferred or exchanged, and could also be collected as a digital collectible.

The announcement also mentioned that Tianya users' personal written works or related IPs can be generated into on-chain digital collectibles with one click through "Tianya Yuanzuan" and can be circulated in a manner permitted by laws and regulations.

By 2026, "Tianya Yuanzuan" was no longer the main focus; the stage had shifted to "Tianya Rebooter Digital Badge." After the metaverse craze subsided, Tianya changed its keywords to AI digital life, overseas Tianya, decentralized community governance, IP copyright digital asset trading, and compliant consortium blockchain digital collectibles.

The name has changed, but the underlying impulses remain the same.

This direction is not entirely without logic. Tianya does indeed possess scarce content assets. A large amount of original narratives, public discussions, and grassroots texts from the early days of the Chinese internet were accumulated in this forum.

In an era where AI training, IP adaptation, content copyright, and digital identity are being repriced, Tianya's data is not without value. However, whether that value can be realized depends on whether subsequent mechanisms can keep up.

summary

Tianya's predicament reflects the real predicament of an old community: valuable content, but insufficient cash flow; deep-rooted sentiment, but products have been stagnant for too long; the brand still has memorable aspects, but users' attention has long since shifted to short videos, social media, and AI content platforms.

1999 yuan can buy a badge, a sense of identity as a "founding member," but it can't take you back to the BBS era. In that era, users were willing to spend hours writing a long post, willing to reply to a stranger late at night, and willing to debate public events until dawn.

The next step is to prove whether, after Tianya returns, besides selling a digital ticket to the "new Tianya," it can regenerate a community where people speak, debate, create, and are willing to stay.

In other words, the most noteworthy aspect of Tianya's relaunch isn't whether it has caught up with Web3, nor whether it will repackage itself as the next decentralized community. The real question is: after trying almost every possible method, can Tianya bring these concepts back to the most basic goal: to get users back, to get content flowing again, and to breathe new life into the community?

In an exclusive interview with Xing Ming, founder of Tianya Community, published by the Science and Technology Innovation Board Daily on February 12, Xing attributed Tianya's past failures to insufficient commercialization awareness, a single monetization model, and missing a crucial window of opportunity for internet commercialization. He mentioned that Tianya initially relied mainly on its own funds for growth, with relatively low commercial pressure, which allowed it to maintain its community atmosphere. However, this also caused the team to miss the best opportunity for commercialization. Later, Tianya became almost entirely dependent on traditional brand advertising revenue, but advertising spending could not be too frequent, otherwise it would damage the community atmosphere, further compressing its growth potential.

In an interview, Xing Ming stated that the core logic behind this relaunch is to abandon the previous single advertising monetization model. Instead, it leverages Tianya's user base, community atmosphere, and IP accumulation, combined with the resources of the Hainan Free Trade Port, to use membership-based e-commerce as the primary monetization path, while simultaneously developing both domestic e-commerce and overseas Web3 platforms. He also previously mentioned that the relaunch requires several million yuan in funding, which, with the support of early external investors and co-founders of "New Tianya," is sufficient to ensure the Tianya community resumes access on June 1, 2026.

The most suspenseful part here is that Xing Ming emphasizes the need to avoid excessive commercialization that could drain users' emotions, while at the same time he must use a sufficiently dense array of commercial initiatives to prove that Tianya can still survive.