Author：Chain Wizard
Original article by Odaily Planet Daily (@OdailyChina)
Author｜Wenser (@wenser2010)
The "lobster craze" sparked by OpenClaw has subsided somewhat on major social media platforms. A few days ago, Claude developer Anthropic...Directly prohibit "OpenClaw subscription-based freeloading"Therefore, some people shouted.Is OpenClaw already dead?.
In my opinion, given that over 90% of the world's 8 billion population has yet to use AI applications, OpenClaw is already a phenomenal AI product, its popularity lasting a full three months speaks volumes about its impact. On the other hand, for most people in China, perhaps compared to OpenClaw's massive token consumption, complex configuration process, excessively frequent updates, and unclear security risks, Xianyu (a Chinese online marketplace) is perhaps the "more localized version of OpenClaw."
Some readers might be wondering: Xianyu? That secondhand trading platform? What does it have to do with OpenClaw, the rising star in the AI field?
Let me explain in detail.
Before OpenClaw gave AI arms and legs, Xianyu had already become a transaction engine in the physical world.
"If previous chatbots gave AI a brain, then OpenClaw's value lies in giving AI hands and feet for the first time."
This statement emphasizes that OpenClaw empowers AI agents with various operational capabilities, enabling them to perform tasks in the digital world on behalf of humans, and even, to some extent, influence the physical world.
However, the more pressing issue facing everyone is that, compared to chatbots where a single conversation consumed tens or hundreds of thousands of tokens, OpenClaw has dramatically increased the number of API calls and tokens made by AI agents to the millions, tens of millions, or even hundreds of millions. Many have stated that, with OpenClaw, and to ensure effectiveness, token spending using high-quality models like Claude, GPT, and Gemini can reach hundreds of dollars per day.
For the same task, ordering from Xianyu (a second-hand marketplace platform) might cost less than one percent of the cost.Yes, you read that right. Since the beginning of the "summer of the 21st century," labor costs on the Xianyu platform have been compressed to the extreme. The time of the "poor" has also acquired its own unit of measurement and pricing system—an economic system operating on RMB and Xianyu coins.
There are top performers in every profession: hospitality, AI, sales, recruitment, and dating.
Xianyu (a second-hand marketplace) frequently sparks heated discussions. People jokingly refer to the all-powerful Xianyu platform as the "dark web of China"—on Xianyu, there's nothing it can't do if you can imagine it.
Someone was selling moldy oranges on Xianyu (a second-hand marketplace app), and they were spotted by biology and medical students who wanted to extract the mold for scientific research. They offered to buy them back for a high price of several hundred to several thousand yuan.
Someone is selling a rare Belgian Wood Dog at a "low price" on Xianyu (a second-hand marketplace), claiming it is a "neutered female dog";
A battle-damaged used iPhone is considered a rare and normal "small case" on Xianyu (a second-hand marketplace).
Booking hotels, buying tickets, purchasing low-priced AI subscriptions, finding helpers, recruiting people, and even dating and matchmaking through Xianyu are also part of the platform's "daily business."
With the unconventional creativity of Xianyu sellers, their "sources" are also quite unconventional:
When someone was helping others collect overdue wages, an 80-year-old grandmother in a wheelchair was dispatched.
I asked someone to book hotel breakfast for me for as low as 5 yuan, only to later discover that they got it by threatening to jump off a building.
You want to go to a music festival but can't get a ticket. You think the scalper has connections to get you in, but instead, he leads you through a dog hole—
The infamous "Xianyu flight ticket refund service" also sparked much discussion on various social media platforms, with the shady practice behind it being "applying for a user's death certificate"—
Looking to buy cheap attraction tickets? A common tactic used by sellers on Xianyu (a Chinese online marketplace) is to call the attraction staff and tell them, "This person is dying."
On this online secondhand trading platform with over 200 million monthly active users, various peripheral market demands and diverse flexible supplies, hidden within the capillaries of China's internet market, coexist. As a result, a consumer market parallel to mainstream e-commerce platforms and even offline shopping channels has gradually expanded into today's diverse trading universe in less than 13 years, recording 217 million monthly active users in March, even surpassing Xiaohongshu.
As early as the beginning of 2024, its daily GMV (gross merchandise volume) had already exceeded 1 billion yuan.Thanks to the "AI camera feature" launched in early March, Xianyu has seen a surge of over 50 million new listings and more than 12 million users participating in the experience. Furthermore, industry forecasts indicate that the domestic secondhand trading market is expected to exceed 3.1 trillion yuan by 2026, with Xianyu playing a significant role in this growth.
The premium economics and libertarian theory behind Xianyu: leverage, arbitrage, collaboration, and productivity
The unique survival rules that distinguish Xianyu from other e-commerce platforms have allowed it to stand out and find its own comfort zone when the domestic internet user market was caught in a saturated competition for existing users.
This situation is similar to the rapid development of AI in recent years and OpenClaw, which topped the GitHub star count list this year. It is based on its own premium economics and theory of free power.
Last month, Justin Sun, the founder of TRON, had...Post a discussionThis phenomenon:
While some of the wording is quite extreme, the "premium theory" and "power theory" do reveal the unique value and market pricing system of Xianyu, a second-hand trading platform. Behind these terms, we can glimpse more of the reasons why Xianyu can be called "China's local OpenClaw":
1. AI's hands and feet, and the leverage of human and material resources
If OpenClaw gave AI the ability to operate independently for the first time, then Xianyu's value lies in enabling human and material resources to flow, circulate, and generate value with extremely low barriers to entry.
As the saying goes, which mocks the devaluation of academic qualifications: "With 3,000 yuan, you can't even buy a 5090 graphics card; but you can hire a college student to work for you."
Whether it's secondhand goods or cheap labor, Xianyu platform fully quantifies and prices them in the market. In a two-sided market where supply far exceeds demand, Xianyu's human and material resources are even more abundant than the AI models and token resources required by OpenClaw.
2. Token Arbitrage and Two-Sided Arbitrage
For countless human users, OpenClaw, with its 24/7 responsiveness and the ability to freely add Skill profiles to expand its capabilities, is undoubtedly a "Token arbitrage tool"—adding the cheapest possible Token raw materials to the machine and then producing specific content production materials according to their own instructions. Although this brings about a large-scale, exponential consumption of Tokens, it still allows countless people to experience for the first time the exhilarating feeling of "controlling AI production materials" and becoming "AI capitalists."
The product resources and market demand on the Xianyu platform represent a two-way arbitrage between buyers and sellers—leveraging low entry barriers and low transaction fees.(Note from Odaily Planet Daily: In June 2024, Xianyu announced that starting September 1 of that year, it would charge all sellers a basic software service fee of 0.6%, with a maximum of 60 yuan per transaction, including individual merchants.)And the large pool of idle human resources gathered by the platform, to do platform business.
Moreover, similar to OpenClaw, which caters to both token providers and users, Xianyu also satisfies the dual needs of product and service providers and market demanders, and it aligns with Maslow's hierarchy of needs.
3. Lobster cooperation and human cooperation
In terms of teamwork, compared to OpenClaw's "Lobster Army" and "AI Agent Team", Xianyu also has its merits, namely, screening professional "mercenaries" who meet different requirements, have different abilities, and play various roles.
Similar to intelligent driving in the new energy vehicle sector, intent engines highly valued in the cryptocurrency market, and large language models that are self-driven, self-evolving, and self-developed in the AI field, Xianyu can also be seen as a "screening platform" for finding collaborating members.
Essentially, the technologies and personnel mentioned above are all part of the same puzzle, and the ultimate goal of users is to make their thoughts, words, and experiences their desired outcomes.
4. Information productivity and information gap productivity
Strictly speaking, AI does not actually create original information. Large language models and various AI agents simply follow reasoning rules to combine, match, and call various information raw materials (including text, images, videos, and other multimodal content) and ultimately output information products in different forms.
In contrast, humans can absorb and learn from information, produce various types of information, and create information gaps to generate value. The service providers on Xianyu possess their own subjective judgment, self-selection, and self-motivation capabilities.
For overseas countries facing high labor costs and an aging population, AI agent applications like OpenClaw and embodied intelligent robots may have opened a new window for productivity development. However, for domestic internet users who have benefited from past demographic, resource, and even manufacturing dividends, platforms like Xianyu, which provide internet labor and goods services, may be a better solution. As Baidu founder Robin Li once bluntly stated—when it comes to trading privacy for convenience, the Chinese have always been uninhibited. Compared to Xianyu, which encourages users to voluntarily hand over their personal information in exchange for efficiency and convenience, OpenClaw, with its potential security risks, pales in comparison.
The decline in popularity of AI agents and OpenClaw, viewed from another perspective, might be largely due to—
Xianyu (a second-hand marketplace) is more suitable for Chinese babies than OpenClaw.
References:
I haven't been on Xianyu for 3 days, how did it become the Chinese dark web?!
The Chinese version of the dark web really understands what young people want.
Xianyu doesn't want to compete with Xiaohongshu, but it's truly out of options.
