Author: Kuri, Deep Tide TechFlow

Spend ten thousand dollars to buy an API Key, and receive a dinner ticket, located at Mar-a-Lago in Florida, dining with Don Jr.

This is not a joke.

On May 5, World Liberty Financial (a cryptocurrency project co-founded by the Trump family, hereinafter referred to as WLFI) official account shared a new product called WorldClaw, which was subsequently shared by Don Jr.'s social media.

WorldClaw claims to be the first AI project in the WLFI ecosystem, positioned as an “AI Agent Operating System.”

Experience shows that to see whether a business is successful, you only need to check if the big players in the industry are involved; and this project is essentially an AI relay business.

Currently, the core function launched on WorldClaw is called WorldRouter, which does the following: it packages the APIs of major AI models such as Claude, GPT, Gemini, and Qianwen behind a single interface. By registering an account and getting an API Key, users can switch and invoke all models.

According to the official website, there are currently over 60 models integrated, with plans to cover over 300 in the future.

According to the WorldClaw website, the pricing of WorldRouter is about 30% lower than the public prices of various model providers and the public price of OpenRouter.

For example, with Claude Sonnet 4.6, Anthropic charges $3 per million Tokens for the input end, while WorldRouter charges $2.1. As for how they manage to be cheaper, the website does not specify...

No KYC is required, no foreign phone numbers or credit cards are needed. If you want to use its relay service, the payment method only accepts one: the USD stablecoin USD1 issued by WLFI.

Then, the product purchase packages are divided into 4 tiers:

The cheapest option is to buy 1000 AI points for $9.9, the standard version is to buy 10,000 points for $99; while the most expensive Max package is $9999 (or lock 2.5 million WLFI tokens), buying 1 million AI points, plus a hardware device with no public brand and specifications; the website includes a note below the image: “Image for illustration purposes only; the actual product may differ.” Expected delivery is in the third quarter of 2026.

We are not even sure what this hardware is for.

However, the most attractive part is that by purchasing the Max package, you can also participate in a lottery for a private dinner at Mar-a-Lago, where you might get the chance to dine with the Trump family.

The AI relay business is not new, and there are at least 84 similar products documented by TokenNav, both domestically and internationally. But WorldClaw is the first to package AI credits with a presidential family dinner.

In such a crowded field, how much of a moat can a dinner ticket provide?

Intense, Too Intense

How much can an AI relay station earn?

The current benchmark in this field is OpenRouter, founded by former OpenSea CTO Alex Atallah. According to public reports, a16z led a $40 million investment last year, giving it a valuation of $500 million. The team has fewer than ten people and generates over $100 million in annual revenue, taking a 5% cut from each API call.

OpenRouter has proven that this business can scale. But beneath it, competition is far more intense than most people imagine.

In March of this year, Deep Tide reported on the token gold rush driven by OpenClaw, mentioning that some relay station operators were making profits of over a million in a single month. According to an investigation by Tencent News, there are three sources of profit for relay stations: the money from access fees, the money from credit management, and the money from information opacity.

The domestic relay station strategies are much wilder than OpenRouter.

According to evaluations on Zhihu, some sites have reduced the price of Claude Sonnet 4.6 to 30% of the official price, equivalent to about 0.45 yuan per million tokens.

How did they do it?

By bulk purchasing subscription accounts, using browser automation and reverse engineering to wrap the web-based dialogue interface into an API. Users think they are using the official API, but in the background, it might be a rotating cookie pool.

This operation certainly has compliance issues. According to public reports, the National Computer Virus Emergency Response Center has issued multiple warnings about the multiple legal risks of AI relay stations. But the demand is too strong, and prices are just too cheap, so users are still flocking in.

Previously, Sun Ge's B.AI also operated relay stations, and now even Fu Sheng has entered the game. EasyRouter, under Cheetah Mobile, launched this year, targeting an 85% discount across the board, with some models as low as a 25% discount...

Looking back at WorldClaw.

It claims to be 30% cheaper than the official price, which is considered sincere among legitimate channels, but in the entire relay station market, this price is completely uncompetitive. A domestic user looking for cheap and easy options has dozens of more mature and cheaper alternatives.

WorldClaw is clearly not competing for the same batch of users as those sites. It may even be that its original intention is not in the relay station business.

The Real Intent Lies Not in the Relay Station, but in the Stablecoin

OpenRouter accepts credit cards, domestic relay stations accept Alipay and WeChat, and some even accept USDT. WorldClaw only accepts one: USD1.

This choice itself is the answer.

USD1 is a US dollar stablecoin launched by WLFI in March 2025, pegged 1 to 1 with the dollar, and according to official information, it is custodied by BitGo Trust, with underlying assets including US Treasury bonds, dollar deposits, and cash equivalents, currently operating on Ethereum, BNB Chain, and Solana.

In simple terms, WLFI wants to create its own USDT.

The payment design of WorldClaw revolves around USD1. Buying AI points uses USD1. If you don’t want to spend money, you can also lock WLFI tokens to exchange for credits, with the Pro package corresponding to locking 250,000 tokens and the Max corresponding to 2.5 million tokens. Both paths lead to the same endpoint: binding users into the WLFI token ecosystem.

More notably, there is something called AgentPay SDK. WorldClaw has integrated it into the product, allowing AI Agents to autonomously make payments using USD1 when performing tasks. If this feature works, it means that every time an AI automatically calls a model or executes a workflow, there will be a USD1 on-chain transaction.

Machines do not prefer payment tools; whoever is embedded first is the default option.

According to public reports, WLFI has submitted an application for a national bank trust license to the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency. Once the license is obtained, WLFI can independently issue, custody, and exchange USD1 under a regulated entity, no longer reliant on third parties. This license aims to transform USD1 from a project token into a compliant financial infrastructure.

Putting these pieces together, WorldClaw's business logic becomes clear.

Relay stations in the market are all competing for the same thing: who has more comprehensive models, who has lower prices, who has shorter latencies.

WorldClaw does not compete with these. It competes in the payment layer. Every user coming to buy AI points must first hold USD1. The more it is used, the greater the on-chain circulation of USD1.

AI demand is the entry point; the adoption rate of stablecoins is the true metric WLFI is aiming for.

So you have to see it this way, WorldClaw is not an AI company that has added a cryptocurrency payment feature, it is a cryptocurrency project that has found a distribution channel through AI.

A Turbulent Year

On April 22 this year, Sun Yuchen officially sued WLFI in federal court in San Francisco, accusing it of extortion and claiming that WLFI was "on the brink of collapse," openly questioning whether USD1 has sufficient reserves to back it up.

On May 4, WLFI counter-sued, accusing Sun Yuchen of initiating a "coordinated smear campaign," hiring influencers and bots to spread false information with the intent to lower token prices.

On May 5, WorldClaw went live.

Aside from the lawsuit, WLFI's governance structure itself has also been a focal point of community controversy. According to reports from Taiwanese blockchain media Chain News, the largest single wallet of WLFI holds nearly 13% of the voting power, with the top four wallets controlling about 40% in total.

Previously, the WLFI treasury had used 5 billion of its own tokens as collateral to borrow $75 million stablecoins from a lending platform called Dolomite, co-founded by one of its co-founders, which was criticized by the community as indirect monetization.

This is the underlying ecosystem behind WorldClaw.

AI relay stations operate on a pre-load model, where users first deposit money before consuming services. This means trust is a prerequisite. You have to believe that the platform won't run away, that the model calls are real, and that the money you deposit can be reliably exchanged for services.

For a domestic small relay station, this trust relies on the reputation of the station operator and community oversight. For WorldClaw, it relies on the ecological credibility of WLFI. And WLFI's credibility is currently being simultaneously tugged in both directions in the federal court in San Francisco and the court in Delaware.

In essence, the ability of AI relay stations to repackage APIs is not scarce; the challenge lies in gaining users' trust to put their money upfront.

WorldClaw's answer is the name of the presidential family and a ticket to a dinner at Mar-a-Lago. Whether this answer is sufficient is for everyone to judge for themselves.