OpenClaw Gold Rush: The Shovel Sellers Never Worry

OpenClaw has become a huge sensation in China. How many people around you are anxious, and how many are counting their money?

Some are traveling across the country—flying to Shenzhen, Chengdu, Hangzhou—specifically to set up this “Lobster” for small business owners, earning over ten thousand yuan per deal.

Others are directly shipping OpenClaw hardware integrated into Apple devices to clients, ready to use immediately, accumulating $1.8 million in revenue.

Once struggling crypto mining hardware manufacturers have transformed into sellers of OpenClaw hardware.

Middlemen reselling Token APIs quietly making millions per month.

This is the real face of the OpenClaw wave: on the surface, millions are busy deploying, buying hardware, and courses; behind the scenes, a complete industry chain is turning this collective anxiety into profit layer by layer.

From selling hardware to cloud servers, from selling tokens to skills—free open-source code is available, but anxiety is the real commodity.

Turning OpenClaw into hardware

A widely circulated photo online shows many people laughing and crying at the same time.

In the 1990s, qigong masters drew circles on aluminum pots to supposedly connect with cosmic energy; in 2026, people wear lobster hats in conference rooms for ideological cleansing—like not owning a lobster means falling behind.

But after the laughter, attention should be paid to the speaker 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 world, the most trending person is definitely Boss Kong Jianping… He never misses big money, and he’s not sloppy with small money.”

During Bitcoin mining’s heyday, he launched Nano Labs. When the metaverse heated up, he announced a shift from mining hardware to metaverse projects, claiming the metaverse would usher in a new era for humanity. When Hong Kong policies became favorable, he moved into Hong Kong, becoming a director at Cyberport. During the DAT craze, he started a DAT company…

This time, OpenClaw has made him famous again. Kong Jianping has held offline events across the country, declaring that humanity has entered the “Web 4.0” era led by AI agents, simultaneously launching the hardware iPollo Claw PC, described as “designed specifically for OpenClaw applications,” with an AMD 5600H processor, up to 64GB RAM, pre-installed with ClawOS native system, priced at $439 on the official website.

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

In Dongguan, a hardware manufacturer’s sales team’s social media is filled with Lobster Logos: OpenClaw Lobster Hardware Solutions, supporting OEM and ODM, welcoming B2B and commercial clients.

A standard white-label factory—anyone interested can make a call and produce a “customized AI host optimized for OpenClaw.”

Like this Dongguan company, many upstream factories in this hardware chain are former producers of Filecoin and other crypto mining rigs. They are very familiar with this script: concept explosion, hardware demand surge, OEM premium, and a window of opportunity for profit.

The supply chain response speed honed during the mining era is equally effective in this new track.

The core logic of this business is not mysterious: Mac Mini is the most recommended local hardware for OpenClaw, but for most ordinary users, a Mac Mini costing over 3,000 yuan plus a command-line setup without graphics is too high a barrier. Demand arises, and someone offers a “lowering the threshold” service or even sells a “plug-and-play” machine, monetizing this barrier.

The deeper the anxiety, the higher the premium.

Token relay is a big business

OpenClaw itself is free, but running it requires continuously feeding tokens to large models.

Domestic large model companies MINIMAX and KIMI are among the biggest beneficiaries, but some still want to use overseas large models like Claude and ChatGPT for complex tasks.

The problem is: registering accounts and making payments are difficult, and Claude frequently bans Chinese users. Official API prices are high; a high-intensity OpenClaw user running full Claude can easily spend over $800 per month.

This has spawned a huge token relay market.

On the market, you can buy “50% or even 30% off Claude API,” but where they come from remains a mystery.

On the surface, this industry looks like a simple arbitrage business—obtaining low-cost APIs, reselling at a markup, and pocketing the difference—but the depths go far beyond that.

At the most basic level, some rely on credit card fraud to mass-register OpenAI and Anthropic accounts. Once they have the accounts, the most common method is reverse-engineering the web interfaces of ChatGPT and Claude, packaging them as standard APIs for resale.

One API relay service’s pricing shows that their reverse-engineered Claude Code API is 89% cheaper than the official. The official price is $0.024 per 1,000 tokens, but they only charge $0.0024 per 1,000 tokens.

Even more profitable is selling fake versions directly.

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

They found nearly half of third-party API endpoints are engaged in deception.

You pay for an API, expecting to call GPT-5, but what runs in the background could be a low-cost domestic model or even a free open-source model running locally (like GLM-4-9B).

Among 17 top shadow API providers identified by CISPA, 15 are operated solely by individuals, and over 88.2% lack even basic ICP registration.

A relay API operator told Deep潮 TechFlow that top relay APIs can generate millions in monthly profit, with demand very strong.

All these are just on the cost side. Yan, a former Manus employee, revealed a deeper logic: many token relay stations’ core purpose isn’t just selling APIs but collecting high-quality distilled data for specific scenarios.

“All requests passing through relays—full prompts plus responses—are ready-made distilled data. Especially in OpenClaw programming scenarios, users generate complex reasoning chains and real engineering decisions, which are gold for model training. So, some relay stations’ real business model might be: charging relay fees on the surface, but actually packaging your request data and selling it to big companies for model distillation—making you both a paying customer and a free training data producer, a win-win.”

Above this entire chain, there’s a seemingly cleaner business: token aggregation routing services that connect multiple models’ APIs, automatically routing based on task complexity—simple tasks to domestic models, complex ones to Claude or GPT—claiming to save users 65% to 80% on API costs. This service is valuable; whoever controls this traffic gateway can build a genuine user usage profile earlier than any model vendor.

Data is always the real asset.

Information asymmetry is the oldest business

If the first two Lobster gold mines rely on hardware and data, the third relies on something more straightforward: what you know that others don’t.

Li Huan’s recent business involves traveling nationwide. He carries a laptop, flying to Shenzhen, Chengdu, Hangzhou—installing OpenClaw for small business owners, connecting it with Feishu, DingTalk, setting up automation workflows and custom Skills. Each deal earns thousands or even tens of thousands of yuan, often surpassing many programmers’ monthly salaries.

An counterintuitive fact is that Li Huan isn’t a programmer; he’s from a liberal arts background. He openly admits he’s not selling technology but information asymmetry—turning a hot concept directly into a product that bosses can use immediately, while also providing emotional value to ease their anxiety.

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

Adam isn’t an engineer either. He and his wife Allison run a roofing industry consulting business. After OpenClaw became popular, he did something seemingly barrier-free in the tech world: pre-installing OpenClaw into MacBooks, connecting it with industry-specific Skills packages, HubSpot CRM, and work order systems, securing data safety, then mailing directly to clients. Plug in power, and AI staff start working. One-on-one training, ongoing weekly support, priced at $5,000 per unit.

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

Many first reactions are: isn’t this just installing a free open-source project into hardware and charging $5,000?

Yes. But Adam isn’t selling software or hardware. He’s selling the certainty that a roofing contractor, with no technical knowledge, can have AI staff start working tomorrow. Most people don’t hesitate to spend $5,000 because Adam understands their pain points better than anyone—he’s been in this industry for over a decade.

That’s the essence of the information asymmetry business: truly understanding your customers’ needs.

Back in China, this business has taken on a different flavor.

On Taobao, more than one installation service store with over 1,000 orders has a team of dozens of engineers. In the past month, they earned between 300,000 and 450,000 yuan from installing OpenClaw. Some even promise “on-site deployment plus a free cooking service once,” claiming they can cook home-style dishes.

This track is so hot that even Meituan and JD.com have entered, offering remote deployment services in partnership with Lenovo IT services. From individual entrepreneurs to internet giants, everyone is making money, proving the demand is real and substantial.

Skills sales are the other side of this logic.

OpenClaw’s plugin ecosystem, ClawHub, has over 5,700 contributed Skills plugins. Some sell ready-made Skills packages, others sell role configuration templates like SOUL.md—AI CEO, marketing director, legal reviewer—priced from $19 to $99. Some offer custom development services, others sell comprehensive OpenClaw tutorials.

The higher the technical barrier, the more willing people are to pay to lower it. This rule has never failed in every tech cycle.

The shovel sellers are never anxious

On a platform aggregating startups with verified Stripe income, there are 126 projects related to OpenClaw, ranked in real-time based on the last 30 days’ verifiable revenue.

The data is brutal: among the top 30 earning projects, over 17 are doing the same thing—one-click cloud hosting.

Claw Mart earned $54,000 in the last 30 days; Donely’s total revenue is $747,000; RoofClaw’s total is $1.8 million.

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

The first wave of shovel sellers has already begun to withdraw. A project called QuickClaw, promising “30 seconds deployment on mobile,” rapidly gained traffic during a peak week, then offered to sell for $300,000 as a package.

This is the most authentic rhythm of this wave: technological concept explosion, window of information asymmetry opens, the first batch rushes in, benefits quickly fade, and the shovel sellers sell their shovels and exit.

Kong Jianping has long internalized this rhythm. From Bitcoin miners to OpenClaw hosts, spanning an entire crypto era. Each time, he hits the wave precisely—not because he understood the technology earlier, but because he understood human nature: the fear of falling behind, and how much people are willing to pay to dispel that fear.

The comic comparison of qigong heat makes people laugh—two eras, the structure is identical: aluminum pots and lobster hats, rituals, visualizations of anxiety, symbols of “I am on the right side.”

The only difference is that in 2026, that lobster hat is backed by a real industry chain—more sophisticated, more adept at monetizing human nature.

In 1849, during the California Gold Rush, the ones who made money weren’t miners but Levi Strauss selling jeans.

This story has been told for 175 years, every wave of technological change repeated.

Because each time, it’s correct.

The people selling shovels don’t bet on the success of the technology—they bet on human nature’s stability.

And that’s why they are never anxious.