Xianyu, a better OpenClaw for Chinese babies

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Original | Odaily Star Daily Report (@OdailyChina)

Author | Wenser (@wenser2010)

The “hottest lobster” wave sparked by OpenClaw has slightly cooled across major social media platforms. Just a couple of days ago, Claude’s developer Anthropic directly posted a ban on “OpenClaw subscription-based free-riding,” and from that, some people are asking whether “OpenClaw has already run its course.”

In my view, against the backdrop that, worldwide, of the 8 billion people on the planet, more than 90% still haven’t used an AI application, OpenClaw has already become a phenomenon-level AI product. It’s been popular for a full 3 months, which is proof of its massive attention and impact. On the other hand, for most people in China, compared with OpenClaw—which consumes a huge amount of tokens, has a complicated configuration process, updates too frequently, and whose security risks are unclear—perhaps Xianyu is that “more localized OpenClaw.”

Maybe some people who read this will feel confused: Xianyu? That secondhand trading platform? What does it have to do with OpenClaw, the star AI product right now?

Let me break it down in detail.

Before OpenClaw made AI grow hands and feet, Xianyu had already become an engine for trading in the physical world

“If the Chatbot of the past gave AI a brain, then the value of OpenClaw lies in being the first to give AI hands and feet.”

This line emphasizes that OpenClaw equips AI agents with a variety of operational and execution capabilities—replacing humans to carry out all kinds of tasks in the digital world, and even, to a certain extent, acting back on the physical world.

The more realistic question facing everyone, though, is that compared with chatbot conversations in the past—where token consumption was on the order of tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands—OpenClaw has caused the scale of API calls and token usage for AI agents to jump dramatically to the millions, tens of millions, or even hundreds of millions. Many people have said outright that since OpenClaw appeared, for the sake of ensuring performance, tokens spent on high-quality models like Claude, GPT, and Gemini can easily reach several hundred dollars in a single day.

With the same task, placing an order on Xianyu could cost less than one percent. Yes, you read that right. After entering “the summer of the 21st century,” the human cost on the Xianyu platform has been compressed to the extreme. Even “the time of the poor” has its own measurement unit and pricing system—a set of economic mechanisms running on RMB and Xianyu Coins.

360 lines, master every craft: wine travel, AI, sales, recruiting, and matchmaking

Xianyu sparks heated discussions from time to time. People jokingly call Xianyu, with its all-powerful platform, “China’s dark web”—on Xianyu, there’s nothing you can’t think of, and nothing it can’t do.

Someone sold moldy oranges on Xianyu, and students from biology and medicine picked up on them at a glance, saying they wanted to extract the mold for research—then they bought them back at a high price of a few hundred to a few thousand RMB.

Someone also “sold” a “low-priced” rare dog on Xianyu—the Belgian Wood Dog—claiming it was a “spayed mother dog.”

A battle-worn secondhand iPhone is already considered one of the rare “normal little cases” on Xianyu.

As for booking hotels on Xianyu, buying tickets, buying low-price AI subscription memberships, finding helpers, recruiting people, and even matchmaking for marriage, all of that is part of the platform’s “day-to-day business.”

With sellers’ extraordinary imaginations on Xianyu, “sources of supply” are also quite unconventional:

There are people who help collect unpaid wages for others—the person sent is an over-80-year-old grandma in a wheelchair—

For arranging hotel breakfasts for someone, the fee was as low as 5 yuan, and only later did they realize it was because they got the money by threatening to jump—

They wanted to see a music festival but didn’t get tickets. You thought the scalpers had connections to get you in, but they turned around and led you into a dog hole—

The “Xianyu ticket refund/turn-in for flights” that used to be famous has also sparked plenty of discussion across major social media platforms. The shady maneuver behind it is “applying for a user death certificate”—

Want to buy low-price scenic area tickets? The seller’s out-of-play tactics on Xianyu were simply to call the scenic spot staff and tell them, “This person is already not doing great”—

On this internet secondhand trading platform with over 200 million monthly active users, all kinds of niche market demands hidden in the fine capillaries of China’s online market, and all sorts of flexible supplies, coexist in the same room. As a result, within less than 13 years, a consumer market parallel to mainstream e-commerce platforms and offline shopping channels has gradually expanded into today’s multi-dimensional trading universe. In March, it recorded 217 million monthly active users—surpassing even Xiaohongshu.

As early as the beginning of 2024, its daily GMV (gross merchandise value) had already exceeded 1 billion RMB. Now, thanks to the “AI camera feature” launched at the beginning of March, new listings on Xianyu have surged by over 50 million items, and over 12 million users have participated in the experience. In addition, industry predictions point out that in 2026, the domestic secondhand trading market size in China may exceed 3.1 trillion RMB, and Xianyu will play an indispensable role.

The premium-economics behind Xianyu and the theory of “free power”: leverage, arbitrage, collaboration, and productivity

Unlike other e-commerce platforms’ unique survival rules, when Xianyu found itself stuck in stock/volume competition in China’s internet user market, it emerged from the crowd and found its own comfortable niche.

And behind this situation, there’s an analogy to OpenClaw—an AI that has developed rapidly in recent years and topped GitHub’s stars ranking list this year—because it also hides a set of its own premium-economics and “theory of free power.”

Last month, TRON founder Justin Sun also wrote about this phenomenon:

Although some of the wording is quite extreme, the “premium theory” and “power theory” within it do reveal the unique value and pricing system of Xianyu, this secondhand trading platform. And behind these words, we can also glimpse why Xianyu is called the “China-local OpenClaw”:

1. AI hands and feet, and the human/physical-materials leverage

If OpenClaw was the first to give AI independent execution capabilities, then the value of Xianyu lies in letting human effort and physical resources flow, circulate, and produce value with very low barriers.

As the joke about diploma inflation goes: “For 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 has done full market pricing and value quantification. In a two-sided market where supply far exceeds demand, Xianyu’s human and physical resources are even more abundant than the AI model and token resources that OpenClaw needs.

2. Token arbitrage and two-sided arbitrage

For countless human users, OpenClaw—which responds within 24 hours and allows you to freely add Skill configuration files to expand the boundaries of your capabilities—is undoubtedly a “token arbitrage tool”: you insert as low-cost token inputs as possible into the machine, and then produce specific content and output production resources according to your own instructions. Although this creates large-scale, exponential token usage and consumption issues, it still lets countless people experience for the first time the thrill of “controlling AI production resources,” and becoming an “AI capitalist.”

Meanwhile, the commodity resources and market demand on Xianyu are a kind of two-sided arbitrage that relies on both buyers and sellers—using a relatively low cost to enter, relatively lower transaction fees (Odaily Star Daily Report Note: In June 2024, Xianyu announced that beginning September 1 of that year, it would charge all sellers a 0.6% basic software service fee, with a maximum of 60 yuan per transaction; individual merchants are included in that) and a large pool of idle human resources gathered on the platform to run platform-based business.

Moreover, similar to how OpenClaw balances token providers and token consumers, Xianyu also satisfies two-sided needs: product and service providers versus market demanders—and those needs correspond to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.

3. Lobster collaboration and human collaboration

In terms of team collaboration, compared with OpenClaw’s “lobster legion” and “AI Agent teams,” Xianyu also has its advantages: it offers professional “mercenaries” that can be filtered to meet different requirements, different capabilities, and various roles.

Just like the intelligent driving in the new energy vehicle sector, the intention engine highly favored in the crypto market, and the large language models in the AI field that are self-driven, self-evolving, and self-researching, Xianyu can also be seen as a “screening platform” for finding collaboration members.

In essence, the puzzle pieces formed by the technologies and people involved above are all the same thing. The ultimate goal of users is the same: what you think is what you want, what you say is what you use, and what you see is what you get.

4. Information productivity and information-gap productivity

Strictly speaking, AI does not originate information. Large language models and various AI agents merely follow reasoning rules to combine, match, and call on different information inputs (including text, images, videos, and other multimodal content), ultimately outputting finished information products in different forms.

By contrast, humans can both absorb information and learn it, and also produce all kinds of information—then create value by manufacturing information gaps through various kinds of information. On Xianyu, all kinds of service providers have their own subjective judgment abilities, self-filtering abilities, and self-driven capabilities.

For overseas countries where labor costs remain high and population aging is accelerating, AI agent applications represented by OpenClaw, along with embodied-intelligence robots, may open a new “window for productivity development.” For domestic internet users who have enjoyed demographic dividends, resource dividends, and even manufacturing dividends, perhaps a platform like Xianyu—an internet labor force and goods/services provider platform—is the better solution. Just like the blunt truth that Baidu founder Robin Li offered earlier—when it comes to trading privacy for convenience, Chinese people have always had no taboos. In the face of Xianyu, where users are asked to hand over personal information to get efficient convenience, OpenClaw, which has potential security risks, can only count as “less harmful than worse.”

With the heat around AI agents and OpenClaw cooling down, taking another perspective, the biggest reason may be—

Xianyu, the OpenClaw that fits Chinese people’s babies better.

References:

OpenClaw—has it cooled off?

Haven’t been on Xianyu for 3 days—how did it become China’s dark web?!

A Chinese version of the dark web—too well understood what young people want

Xianyu doesn’t want to compare itself to Xiaohongshu, but it has no moves left

500 million people are looking for services there—when the economy gets worse, does the “China-style dark web” get hotter?