Original｜Odaily Planet Daily (@OdailyChina)
Author｜Wenser (@wenser2010)
The "lobster craze" ignited by OpenClaw has slightly receded on major social media platforms. A couple of days ago, Claude developer Anthropicissued a statement banning "OpenClaw subscription scavenging", which led some to exclaim"Is OpenClaw already cooling down?"
In my opinion, against the backdrop that over 90% of the world's 8 billion population has yet to use AI applications, OpenClaw is already a phenomenon-level AI product and has garnered widespread attention for a full 3 months. On the other hand, for most people in the domestic market, perhaps compared to OpenClaw, which has significant token consumption, complex configuration processes, high update frequency, and unclear security risks, Xianyu might be the "more local OpenClaw."
Some might find this puzzling: Xianyu? That second-hand trading platform? What does it have to do with the hot AI favorite OpenClaw?
Let me explain in detail.
Before OpenClaw allowed AI to grow limbs, Xianyu had already become a trading engine in the physical world
"If previous chatbots granted AI a brain, then the value of OpenClaw lies in allowing AI to finally have limbs."
This statement emphasizes that OpenClaw gives AI agents various operational capabilities, enabling them to replace humans in executing various tasks in the digital world, and even to some extent affecting the physical world.
However, the more pressing question for everyone is that compared to the tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of tokens consumed in previous chatbot interactions, OpenClaw has skyrocketed the scale of API calls and token usage for AI agents to millions, tens of millions, or even hundreds of millions. Many have stated that after the emergence of OpenClaw, considering effectiveness, it costs hundreds of dollars a day to use premium models such as Claude, GPT, or Gemini.
Meanwhile, the same tasks on Xianyu might cost less than one percent. Yes, you read that right. Entering the "summer of the 21st century," labor costs on the Xianyu platform have been compressed to the extreme. The "poor man's" time now has its own measurement units and pricing system—a set of economic systems based on RMB and Xianyu coins.
In every field, there are outstanding talents: hospitality, AI, sales, recruitment, matchmaking
Xianyu occasionally sparks waves of discussion. People whimsically refer to the omnipotent Xianyu platform as the "domestic dark web"—on Xianyu, there’s nothing you can’t expect, and nothing it can’t achieve.
Someone on Xianyu sold moldy oranges, which were immediately spotted by biology and medical students who said they wanted to extract fungi for research, paying several hundred to several thousand yuan for the buyback; 
Someone "cheaply" sold a rare purebred dog—a Belgian Malinois, claiming it was a "spayed female.";
A damaged second-hand iPhone is already considered an ordinary "small case" on Xianyu.
As for booking hotels, buying tickets, purchasing low-cost AI subscription memberships, seeking help, recruiting, or even matchmaking and dating on Xianyu, these are also part of the platform's "daily business."
With the extraordinary creativity of Xianyu sellers, the "source" is quite non-mainstream:
There are those helping others claim overdue wages, sending in an 80-year-old grandma in a wheelchair for the job—
Someone sought help booking a hotel breakfast for as low as 5 yuan, only to later find out it was obtained through a threat to jump off a building—
Want to go to a music festival but didn’t get a ticket? You thought the scalper had connections to get you in, but unexpectedly they took you through a dog hole—
The previously notorious "Xianyu flight ticket cancellation" also sparked much discussion on various social media platforms, with some behind-the-scenes antics including "applying for a user’s death certificate"—
Want to buy cheap tickets for scenic spots? Xianyu sellers' trick is to call the scenic spot staff and tell them "this person is almost gone"—
On this internet second-hand trading platform with over 200 million monthly active users, various marginal market demands and diverse flexible supplies coexist within the capillaries of the domestic internet market. Consequently, a consumer market parallel to mainstream e-commerce platforms and even offline shopping channels has gradually expanded into today’s multi-faceted trading universe, recording 217 million monthly active users in March, surpassing Xiaohongshu.
As early as the beginning of 2024, its daily average GMV (Gross Merchandise Volume) had surpassed 1 billion yuan, and now, thanks to the "AI camera feature" launched in early March, Xianyu added over 50 million new products, with more than 12 million users participating in the experience. Additionally, industry forecasts suggest that by 2026, the domestic second-hand trading market scale is expected to exceed 3.1 trillion yuan, with Xianyu playing an indispensable role.
The premium economics and theories of freedom behind Xianyu: leverage, arbitrage, collaboration, and productivity
Unlike the unique survival rules of other e-commerce platforms, Xianyu has emerged amid stagnant competition in the domestic internet user market, finding its own comfort zone.
This current state is akin to the rapid development of AI in recent years and this year’s top-rated OpenClaw on GitHub—it holds its own set of premium economics and theories of freedom.
Last month, TRON founder Justin Sundiscussed this phenomenon:
Although some of the wording is somewhat extreme, phrases like "premium theory" and "theory of power" indeed reveal the unique value and market pricing system of Xianyu as a second-hand trading platform. Behind these terms, we can glimpse the reasons why Xianyu is referred to as the "Chinese local OpenClaw":
1. AI limbs and human resource leverage
If OpenClaw is the first to endow AI with independent operational capabilities, then the value of Xianyu lies in enabling human and material resources to flow, circulate, and generate value at an incredibly low threshold.
As the joking saying about the devaluation of educational qualifications goes: "For 3000 yuan, you can't even buy a 5090 graphics card; but you can hire a university student to work for you."
Whether second-hand goods or cheap labor, Xianyu offers sufficient market pricing and value quantification for both. In a bilateral market where supply far exceeds demand, the human and material resources on Xianyu are even more abundant than the AI models and token resources OpenClaw requires.
2. Token arbitrage and bilateral arbitrage
For countless human users, the 24-hour responsiveness and the ability to freely add skill configuration files to expand capability boundaries of OpenClaw is undoubtedly a "token arbitrage tool"—adding the cheapest token materials into the machine and then producing specific content generation materials based on their own directive requirements. Although this resulted in massive, exponential token consumption issues, it still allowed many to experience the thrill of "mastering AI production materials" and becoming "AI capitalists" for the first time.
On the other hand, the product resources and market demands on the Xianyu platform represent a kind of bilateral arbitrage relying on the buying and selling parties—utilizing a low barrier to entry and low transaction fees(Odaily Planet Daily Note: In June 2024, Xianyu announced it would start charging all sellers a basic software service fee of 0.6% from September 1 of the same year, with a maximum of 60 yuan per transaction, including personal merchants) and the platform's aggregation of large-scale idle labor resources to conduct business on the platform.
Moreover, like OpenClaw caters to both token providers and user consumers, Xianyu also meets the bilateral demands of product service providers and market demanders, resonating with Maslow's hierarchy of needs.
3. Lobster collaboration and human collaboration
In terms of team collaboration, compared to OpenClaw's "lobster legion" and "AI agent group," Xianyu also has its merits, which is selecting professional "mercenaries" that meet various requirements and possess different capabilities to play various roles.
Like the highly praised intent engine in the field of smart driving for new energy vehicles, the AI self-driving, self-evolving, and self-developing large language models, Xianyu can also be viewed as a "filtering platform" for finding collaborative members.
Essentially, the technologies and personnel involved form a unified puzzle; the ultimate goal for users is to obtain what they think, express what they want, and procure what they see.
4. Information productivity and information asymmetry productivity
Strictly speaking, AI does not originally produce information; large language models and various AI agents merely follow reasoning rules to combine, match, and invoke various information materials (including text, images, video, and other multimodal content), ultimately outputting information products in different forms.
In contrast, humans can absorb information, learn information, and produce various information, and can create value through information asymmetry. The various service providers on Xianyu possess their own subjective judgment capabilities, self-selection abilities, and self-driven capabilities.
For overseas countries with high labor costs and increasingly aging populations, AI agent applications represented by OpenClaw and embodied intelligent robots might open a new "window of productivity development" for them; while for the domestic internet populace benefiting from past demographic dividends, resource dividends, and even manufacturing dividends, perhaps platforms like Xianyu, offering internet labor and product services, are the better solution. Just like Baidu founder Robin Li once bluntly stated—the naked truth is that when it comes to exchanging privacy for convenience, Chinese people have always been unrestrained. Facing Xianyu, where users willingly give up personal information for efficient convenience, OpenClaw, with its potential security risks, can only be seen as an insignificant player.
In light of the declining popularity of AI agents and OpenClaw, taking a different perspective, the most significant reason may be——
Xianyu, the more suitable OpenClaw for Chinese users.
References:
What happened after 3 days off Xianyu, it’s become the Chinese dark web?!
The Chinese version of the dark web understands what young people want too well
Xianyu doesn’t want to compare with Xiaohongshu, but it really has no moves left
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