Written by: Black Shrimp Cage, Deep Tide TechFlow

OpenClaw has exploded in popularity in China; how many people around you are anxious, and how many are counting money?

Some people are traveling nationwide, flying to Shenzhen, Chengdu, and Hangzhou, specifically configuring this "lobster" for small bosses, with orders worth tens of thousands of yuan.

Some people directly send OpenClaw installed on Apple devices to clients, ready to use upon startup, accumulating earnings of 1.8 million USD.

Originally struggling, a cryptocurrency mining machine manufacturer has now transformed into selling OpenClaw hardware.

Middlemen reselling Token APIs are quietly making money, earning over a million in profit in a single month.

This is the real facet of the OpenClaw wave: in front, millions are tinkering with deployment, buying hardware, and training courses; behind the scenes, a complete industrial chain is gradually monetizing this collective anxiety, layer by layer.

From selling hardware to cloud servers, from selling Tokens to Skills, the free part is open-source code, while anxiety is the real commodity.

Turning OpenClaw into Hardware

A photo circulating online has many people laughing and crying after seeing it.

In the 1990s, qigong masters drew circles on the crowds' aluminum pots, claiming to connect with cosmic energy; in 2026, people wear lobster hats in meeting rooms for an ideological baptism, as if not raising a lobster means falling behind the times.

After the laughter, it's worth noting the person speaking on stage. His name is Kong Jianping, a crypto OG and founder of iPollo.

Famous KOL "Crypto Fearless" commented on social media: "In the crypto circle, always on the hottest topics is definitely Boss Kong Jianping... He doesn’t miss out on big money, and small money isn’t ambiguous."

When Bitcoin mining was booming, he launched the mining machine company Nano Labs. When the Metaverse was trending, he announced a gradual shift from mining business to Metaverse business, saying it would usher in a new era for humanity; highlighting policies in Hong Kong, he laid out plans there, becoming a director of the Hong Kong Cyberport; during the peak of the DAT concept, he founded DAT company...

This time, with OpenClaw's rise, Kong Jianping is hosting offline events in cities across the country, declaring humanity has entered the "Web 4.0" era led by AI Agents, while launching the iPollo Claw PC hardware, officially introduced as "born for Open Claw applications," featuring an AMD 5600H processor, a maximum of 64GB RAM, pre-installed with ClawOS native system, priced at $439 on the official website.

Kong Jianping is not an isolated case; he is simply the most prominent name in this hardware industrial chain.

In Dongguan, a hardware manufacturer, the sales team's social circles are filled with lobster logos: OpenClaw Lobster Hardware Solutions, supporting OEM ODM, B-end and commercial clients are welcome to call.

A standard white-label factory, anyone wanting to enter the game just has to make a phone call, and they can roll out a “specially optimized AI host for OpenClaw.”

Like this Dongguan company, many of the upstream factories in this hardware industrial chain used to produce Filecoin and other cryptocurrency mining machines; they are very familiar with this script: concept explosion, hardware demand surge, white label premium, harvest window.

The supply chain response speed honed during the mining machine era serves just as well in a different domain.

The core logic of this business is not at all mysterious: the Mac Mini is the most widely recommended local running hardware for OpenClaw, but for most average users, a Mac Mini costing over 3000 yuan plus a command line configuration without a graphical interface is too high a barrier. Hence the demand arises, where someone comes to sell a “lower barrier” service or simply sell a machine that’s “ready to use,” monetizing this threshold.

The deeper the anxiety, the higher the premium.

Token Transfer is a Big Business

OpenClaw is free, but running it requires continuously feeding Tokens to the large model.

Domestic large model companies MINIMAX and KIMI have become some of the biggest beneficiaries, yet some still want to use overseas large models like Claude and ChatGPT to complete complex tasks.

The trouble is: registering accounts and making payments are difficult; Claude frequently bans Chinese-speaking users. Official API prices are steep, and a high-intensity OpenClaw user running Claude fully can easily incur monthly costs exceeding $800.

This has spawned a massive Token transfer market.

On the market, you can buy a large number of “50% or even 30% off Claude API,” but where they come from has always been a mystery.

This industry appears, on the surface, to be a business of price differences, acquiring low-cost APIs and reselling them at markup to earn the middle profit, but the waters run deeper than that.

At the very bottom, some are committing credit card fraud to batch register OpenAI and Anthropic accounts, and after obtaining the accounts, the most common method is to reverse engineer the web interface of ChatGPT or Claude, packaging it as a standard API for resale.

One Token transfer station's price indicates that its reverse-engineered Claude Code API is 89% cheaper than the official price, which is $0.024 per K Token, while it only charges $0.0024 per T Token.

Even more lucrative is selling counterfeits directly.

In early March, CISPA (Helmholtz Information Security Center) released a research report titled “Real Money, Fake Models: Deceptive Model Claims in Shadow APIs.”

They found that nearly half of third-party API endpoints are engaged in deceptive practices.

You pay the API fee, happily thinking you are calling GPT-5, but what merchants are secretly running in the background is highly likely to be a low-cost domestic model, or even a free open-source model running locally (such as GLM-4-9B, etc.).

CISPA's audit identified 17 top independent shadow API service providers, of which 15 are purely operated by individuals, and over 88.2% of the providers don’t even have the most basic Internet Content Provider (ICP) record.

An API transfer operator revealed to Deep Tide TechFlow that now top transfer APIs can achieve monthly profits of hundreds of thousands, with demand remaining extremely strong.

These are just the tales from the cost side; former Manus staff Yan publicly disclosed a deeper logic of this business: the core purpose of many Token transfer stations is not to sell APIs at all, but to collect high-quality distilled data for specific scenarios.

“All requests that pass through the transfer, with complete prompts and responses, result in a ready-made distilled dataset. Especially in the programming context of OpenClaw, the outputs are complex reasoning chains and real engineering decisions, the desired training material for model vendors. So the true business model of certain transfer stations is likely: charging you transfer fees is just the surface business; packaging your request data to sell to big companies for model distillation is the core profit. You are a paying customer while also being a free producer of training data, killing two birds with one stone.”

Above this entire chain, there is another business that appears cleaner: Token aggregation routing service providers, connecting you to APIs of dozens of models, automatically routing based on task complexity, simple tasks using cheaper domestic models, and complex tasks using Claude or GPT, claiming to help users save 65% to 80% in API costs. The service itself holds value; those who control this traffic entry accumulate a true user usage map even faster than any model vendor.

Data is always the real asset.

Information Asymmetry is the Oldest Business

If the first two lobster gold mines relied on hardware and data, the third relies on something more fundamental: you know, and others do not.

Li Huan's recent business involves traveling nationwide. He carries a laptop, flying to Shenzhen, Chengdu, and Hangzhou, installing OpenClaw for small bosses across various regions, connecting it to Feishu and DingTalk, and debugging automated workflows and exclusive Skills. An order can earn him thousands or even tens of thousands of yuan, amounting to more than many programmers' monthly salaries.

An unconventional thing is that Li Huan is not a programmer but comes from a humanities background. He candidly admits that he is not selling technology, but information asymmetry, converting a popular concept directly into a product that bosses can use, while providing emotional value to soothe anxiety.

Taking this logic to the extreme is an American named Adam Sand.

Adam is not an engineer; he and his wife Allison run a consulting business in the roofing industry. After OpenClaw became popular, he did something that seems to lack barriers in the tech circle: he pre-installs OpenClaw on MacBooks, connects it with industry-specific Skills packages, HubSpot CRM, and work order systems, configures data security, and directly mails it to clients. Plug it in, and the AI employee starts work. With one-on-one training and weekly ongoing support, he charges $5000 per unit.

This project is called RoofClaw, with total historical revenue exceeding 1.8 million USD, and over 360 roofing contractors served.

Many people's first reaction is: isn’t this just installing a free open-source project into hardware and charging $5000?

Yes. But Adam is not selling software or hardware. He sells the certainty that a roofing contractor can have AI employees starting work tomorrow without needing to understand any technology. That $5000 is spent without hesitation by most people, because Adam understands their pain points better than anyone; he has been in this industry for over ten years.

This is the essence of the information asymmetry business: truly understanding your clients' needs.

Back to domestic markets, this business has taken on a different flavor.

On Taobao, there are multiple installation service stores with over 1000 cumulative orders, employing teams of dozens of engineers, earning between 300,000 to 450,000 yuan from installing OpenClaw in nearly a month. Some installers even promise on details pages, “On-site deployment, with an additional cooking service provided once, can make home-cooked meals.”

This track is so hot that even Meituan and JD have entered the field, cooperating with Lenovo IT services to offer remote deployment services. From individual operators rolling into well-known internet companies, every level has people making money, indicating that the demand is real and substantial.

The trading of Skills is another side of this logic.

The plugin ecosystem for OpenClaw, ClawHub, already has over 5700 community-contributed Skills plugins. Some are selling ready-made Skills packages, others are selling role configuration templates for SOUL.md, like AI CEO, marketing director, legal examiner, priced between $19 to $99 each, while others are offering custom development services or selling “complete practical tutorials for OpenClaw.”

The higher the technical threshold, the more people are willing to pay to lower it; this rule has never failed in any tech cycle.

Those Who Sell Shovels are Never Anxious

On a platform aggregating entrepreneurial projects with verified revenues via Stripe, there are already 126 entrepreneurial projects surrounding OpenClaw, ranked in real-time based on verifiable revenues from the past 30 days.

The data is brutal: among the top 30 projects making the most money, over 17 are doing the same thing, easy cloud hosting.

Claw Mart's revenue in the last 30 days is $54,000, Donely's total historical revenue is $747,000, and RoofClaw's total historical revenue is $1.8 million.

However, the flip side of the story is: the half-life of information asymmetry is measured in weeks, not months.

The first batch of shovel sellers has already started to retreat. A project called QuickClaw, promoting “30-second deployment of OpenClaw via phone," surged during a certain week of traffic explosion and is now quoting $300,000 for a potential package sale.

This is the most authentic rhythm of this wave: technical concepts explode, the window of information asymmetry opens, the first batch rushes in, the benefits quickly dissipate, and those who sell shovels sell their shovels and exit.

Kong Jianping has long ingrained this rhythm into his muscle memory. He transitioned from Bitcoin mining machines to OpenClaw hosts, spanning an entire crypto era. Each time, he accurately stands at the crest of the wave, not because he understands the technology earlier than others, but because he understands human nature better, grasping the fear of "I cannot fall behind," and how much people are willing to pay to dissolve that fear.

The contrast image of the qigong craze makes people laugh; the scenes from two eras are structurally identical: aluminum pots and lobster hats, both rituals, visualizations of anxiety, symbols of "I have already stood on the right side."

The only difference is that the lobster hat of 2026 is connected to a real industrial chain behind it, more precise, and more aware of human monetization.

During the California Gold Rush of 1849, the ones who made money were not the miners, but Levi Strauss who sold denim.

This story has been told for 175 years; each time a technological wave erupts, it is pulled out to be retold.

Because every time, it is true.

Those who sell shovels do not bet on the win or loss of technology, but on the stability of human nature.

Therefore, they are never anxious.