OpenClaw Gold Rush: The Shovel Sellers Never Worry

Author: Black Shrimp Cage, Deep Tide TechFlow

OpenClaw has become completely popular in China. How many people around you are anxious, and how many are counting money?

Some are on business trips nationwide, flying to Shenzhen, Chengdu, Hangzhou, specifically to equip small bosses with this “Lobster,” earning over ten thousand yuan per deal.

Some directly install OpenClaw into Apple devices and send them to clients, ready to use immediately, accumulating $1.8 million in revenue.

Once struggling crypto mining hardware manufacturers have now transformed, selling OpenClaw hardware.

Middlemen reselling Token APIs quietly making profits, earning over a million yuan per month.

This is the real face of the OpenClaw wave: on the surface, millions are busy deploying hardware, buying courses, and setting up; 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, the open-source code is free, but anxiety is the real commodity.

Turning OpenClaw into Hardware

A photo circulating online makes many people laugh and cry.

In the 1990s, qigong masters drew circles on aluminum pots, claiming to connect with cosmic energy; in 2026, people wear lobster hats in conference rooms for ideological cleansing, as if not raising a lobster makes you fall behind the times.

After the laughter, attention should be paid to the person speaking on stage. His name is Kong Jianping, a crypto OG and founder of iPollo.

Well-known KOL “Crypto Fearless” commented on social media: “In the crypto world, the one always at the hottest spot is definitely Boss Kong Jianping… Missed big money, but not small.”

During Bitcoin mining boom, he launched the mining hardware company Nano Labs. When the metaverse heated up, he announced a shift from mining to metaverse business, believing it would usher in a new era for humanity; with Hong Kong policies in focus, he set up in Hong Kong Digital Harbor; during the DAT craze, he started a DAT company…

This time, OpenClaw has made him famous again. Kong Jianping held offline events across cities nationwide, announcing 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/ODM, B2B and large commercial clients welcome to contact.

A typical white-label factory, anyone interested can make a call and produce a “customized AI host optimized for OpenClaw” under their own brand.

Like this Dongguan company, many upstream factories in this hardware chain are former producers of Filecoin and other crypto mining machines. They are very familiar with this script: Concept explosion, hardware demand surges, OEM markup, capturing the window of opportunity.

The supply chain response speed honed during the mining era is equally effective in other sectors.

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 threshold. So demand arises, and someone offers a “lower the barrier” service, or simply sells a “plug-and-play” machine, monetizing this barrier.

The deeper the anxiety, the higher the premium.

Token Middleman Business

OpenClaw itself is free, but running it requires continuous feeding of 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, ChatGPT for complex tasks.

The trouble 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 led to a huge token middleman market.

On the market, you can buy大量“50% or even 70% off Claude API,” but where they come from remains a mystery.

This industry appears to be a simple arbitrage: obtaining low-cost APIs, reselling at a markup, earning the middle profit, but the depth is much greater.

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

One API middleman’s pricing shows that their reverse-engineered Claude Code API is 89% cheaper than official. Official price is $0.024 per 1K tokens, but they only charge $0.0024 per token.

Even more profitable is selling fake products directly.

In early March, CISPA (Helmholtz Center for Information Security) released a 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 deception.

You pay for an API, happily think you’re calling GPT-5, but in reality, the backend might 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, with over 88.2% lacking even basic ICP registration.

An industry insider involved in API middleman services told Deep Tide TechFlow that top-tier middleman APIs can generate over a million yuan monthly profit, with demand very strong.

All these are just cost-side stories. Former Manus staff Yan revealed a deeper logic: many token middlemen’s core purpose is not just selling APIs but collecting high-quality distilled training data for specific scenarios.

“Every request passing through the middleman, with full prompt and response, is a ready-made distilled dataset. Especially in OpenClaw programming scenarios, users produce complex reasoning chains and real engineering decisions, which are highly sought-after training data for model vendors. So, some middlemen’s real business model might be: charging you a middleman fee on the surface, but actually selling your request data to big companies for model distillation—making you both a paying customer and a free training data producer, a win-win situation.”

Above this entire chain, there’s a seemingly cleaner business: token aggregation routing services, connecting multiple models’ APIs, automatically routing based on task complexity—cheap domestic models for simple tasks, Claude or GPT for complex ones—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 map earlier than any model vendor.

Data is always the real asset.

Information Asymmetry, the Oldest Business

If the first two “Lobster Gold Mines” rely on hardware and data, the third relies on something more straightforward: You know, and others don’t.

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

An counterintuitive fact is that Li Huan is not a programmer; he’s from a liberal arts background. He openly states that 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.

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

Adam is not 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 circle: pre-installing OpenClaw into MacBooks, connecting them with industry-specific Skills packages, HubSpot CRM, and work order systems, with data security configured, 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, delivered to over 360 roofing contractors.

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

Yes. But Adam is not 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 spend that $5,000 without hesitation because Adam understands their pain points better than anyone—he’s been in this industry for over a decade.

This is the essence of the information asymmetry business: truly understanding your customer’s needs.

Back in China, this business has evolved into another scene.

On Taobao, more than one store with over 1,000 orders for installation services, with dozens of engineers, earning between 300,000 and 450,000 yuan in a month from installing OpenClaw. Some even promise “on-site deployment, plus a free cooking service once, with home-style dishes.”

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

Selling Skills is another aspect of this logic.

OpenClaw’s plugin ecosystem ClawHub, with 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, others sell “OpenClaw full practical 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 Sellers Never Worry

On a platform verified by Stripe for income aggregation, there are 126 startup projects around OpenClaw, ranked in real-time based on the last 30 days’ verifiable income.

The data is brutal: among the top 30 most profitable 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 “selling shovels” has already begun to retreat. A project called QuickClaw, claiming “deploy OpenClaw in 30 seconds on your phone,” 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 dissipate, and the sellers of shovels sell out and leave.

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

The humorous comparison of the qigong craze shows that the two eras’ scenes are structurally identical: aluminum pots and lobster hats, both rituals, visualizations of anxiety, symbols of “I am on the right side.”

The only difference is that the lobster hat in 2026 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 but on human nature’s stability.

That’s why they are never anxious.