Xianyu, a better OpenClaw for Chinese babies

Original | Odaily Planet Daily (@OdailyChina)

Author | Wenser (@wenser2010)

The “hummer/lobster craze” sparked by OpenClaw has slightly cooled on 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 as a result, some people are asking, “Is OpenClaw already dead?”

In my view, given that in today’s world population of 8 billion, more than 90% of people still haven’t used any AI application, OpenClaw is already a phenomenon-level AI product. It’s been popular for a full three months—proof of its huge splash effect. On the other hand, for most people in China, perhaps compared with OpenClaw, which consumes lots of tokens, has a complicated setup process, updates too frequently, and whose safety risks are unclear, Xianyu might actually be the “more local OpenClaw.”

Maybe some people reading this feel confused: Xianyu? That secondhand trading platform? What does that have to do with OpenClaw, the current hot AI darling in the industry?

Let me walk you through it step by step.

Before OpenClaw lets AI grow hands and feet, Xianyu had already become the transaction engine of the physical world

“Back then, Chatbot gave AI a brain; then OpenClaw’s value is that it was the first to give AI hands and feet.”

This statement highlights how OpenClaw enables AI Agents with a range of capabilities for operational execution—substituting for humans to carry out tasks in the digital world, and even to some extent, working in reverse back on the physical world.

The more realistic problem facing everyone is that, compared with chatbots whose token consumption typically stays at the scale of tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands per conversation, OpenClaw enables AI Agents to jump their API calls and token usage to millions, tens of millions, and even hundreds of millions. Many people have said that after OpenClaw appeared, for reasons related to ensuring performance, token spending for top-tier models like Claude, GPT, and Gemini could rack up hundreds of dollars in a single day.

And for the same task, ordering on Xianyu could cost less than one percent. Yes, you read that right—after entering “the summer of the 21st century,” human labor costs on the Xianyu platform have been compressed to the extreme. Even “the poor” have their own unit of time and pricing system—an economic system that runs on RMB and Xianyu coins.

360 lines, with each line producing top results: travel and hospitality, AI, sales, hiring, and blind dating

Xianyu often sparks waves of discussion. People jokingly call the all-powerful Xianyu platform “the domestic darknet.” On Xianyu, there’s nothing you can’t think of—only things it can’t do.

Someone sells moldy oranges on Xianyu, and students from biology and medical majors spot them at a glance, saying they want to extract the mold for research—then they pay a high price of several hundred to several thousand RMB for a buyback;

Someone sells rare pedigree dogs on Xianyu “cheaply”—a Belgian wood dog, described as an “already spayed mother dog”;

A battle-worn secondhand iPhone is already considered a hard-to-find “small case” on Xianyu.

As for booking hotels on Xianyu, buying tickets, buying low-priced AI subscription memberships, finding helpers, recruiting people, and even dating and matchmaking—those are also the platform’s “daily operations.”

With the seller’s unusually wild imagination on Xianyu, the “supply sources” are also quite non-mainstream:

Hiring someone to help chase unpaid wages—the one sent is a grandmother over 80 years old in a wheelchair—

Finding someone to book hotel breakfast for you, as low as 5 yuan—only later did you find out it was obtained by threatening to jump off a building—

Wanting to see a music festival but not buying tickets: you think scalpers have their own connections to get you in, but you didn’t expect him to turn around and take you into a dog tunnel—

The “Xianyu secondhand ticket refund replacement” that was once famous has also sparked plenty of discussion on various social media platforms, and the shady operation behind it is “applying for a user death certificate”—

Want to buy low-priced scenic spot tickets? The out-of-play trick from Xianyu sellers is a phone call to tell the scenic area staff, “This person is basically not doing well anymore”—

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

As early as early 2024, its daily average GMV (gross merchandise value) had already exceeded 1 billion yuan. And now, thanks to the “AI camera feature” launched in early March, the number of new listings on Xianyu has surged by more than 50 million, with over 12 million users participating in the experience. Also, some industry forecasts suggest that in 2026, the domestic secondhand trading market could exceed 3.1 trillion yuan, and Xianyu will play a major role in that.

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

Unlike other e-commerce platforms, Xianyu’s unique survival rules helped it break out in the domestic internet user market when things were locked in stagnant competition. It found its own comfortable zone.

And behind this situation, there are striking similarities to AI, which has developed rapidly in recent years, and to OpenClaw, which topped GitHub’s star ranking list this year—behind it lies a whole set of its own value-premium economics and the theory of free power.

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

Although some of the wording is quite extreme, the “value-premium theory” and “power theory” inside it genuinely reveal Xianyu’s unique value and market pricing system as a secondhand trading platform. And behind these words, we can glimpse more reasons why Xianyu has been called the “China-local OpenClaw”:

1. AI hands and feet and human-capital leverage

If OpenClaw is the first to give AI the capability to operate and execute independently, then the value of Xianyu lies in enabling human and material resources to flow, circulate, and generate value with extremely low barriers.

Just like that joke about how education depreciates: “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’s platform performs full market pricing and quantifies value amounts for them. 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 that OpenClaw requires.

2. Token arbitrage and two-sided arbitrage

For countless human users, OpenClaw—where it responds within 24 hours and you can freely add a Skill configuration file to expand the boundaries of capability—is undoubtedly a kind of “token arbitrage tool”: you add the cheapest possible token “raw materials” into the machine, then, based on your instructions, it produces specific content production resources. Although this leads to large-scale, exponential problems with token usage and consumption, it still lets countless people experience for the first time the thrill of “controlling AI production resources,” and becoming an “AI capitalist.”

And the goods resources and market demand on Xianyu are a kind of two-sided arbitrage that relies on both buyers and sellers: by leveraging lower entry barriers, lower transaction fees_ (Odaily Planet Daily Note: In June 2024, the Xianyu platform announced that starting September 1 of that year it would charge all sellers a 0.6% basic software service fee, capped at 60 yuan per transaction; personal merchants are included in that)_ and the large pool of idle labor that the platform aggregates, you do business on the platform.

Moreover, just like OpenClaw, which coordinates both token providers and token consumers, Xianyu also satisfies two-sided demand—product and service providers on one side, and market demand on the other—with alignment to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.

3. Lobster collaboration and human collaboration

In terms of team collaboration, compared with OpenClaw’s “lobster corps” and “AI Agent squads,” Xianyu also has its strengths—namely, it can filter for professional “mercenaries” that meet different requirements, have different capabilities, and play different roles.

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

In essence, the puzzle formed by combining the technologies and people involved above is one and the same thing. The user’s final goal is also the same: what you think is what you get, what you say is what you use, and what you see is what you obtain.

4. Information productivity and information-gap productivity

Strictly speaking, AI doesn’t actually originate information. Large language models and various AI Agents simply follow reasoning rules to combine, match, and call different types of information inputs (including text, images, video, and other multimodal content), and then output information finished products in different forms;

By contrast, humans can both absorb information and learn it, and also produce all kinds of information—plus they can create information gaps through various types of information, and use that to create value. On Xianyu, service providers have their own subjective judgment abilities, self-filtering abilities, and self-driven abilities.

For overseas countries where labor costs are high and population aging is accelerating, AI Agent applications represented by OpenClaw and embodied intelligence robots might open a new “window for productivity development.” And for China’s domestic internet population that has enjoyed past population dividends and resource dividends, and even manufacturing dividends, perhaps a platform like Xianyu—an internet labor and goods/services provider—could be a better solution. Just like Robin Li, the founder of Baidu, bluntly said before: when it comes to trading privacy for convenience, Chinese people have historically had no taboos about it. In the face of Xianyu, which asks users to proactively hand over personal information in exchange for efficient convenience, OpenClaw—despite its potential safety risks—can only be considered a lesser case compared to that.

With the heat around AI Agents and OpenClaw cooling down, from another angle, the biggest reason may be—

Xianyu, the OpenClaw that’s even more suitable for Chinese babies.

References:

Is OpenClaw already cooled off?

Not using Xianyu for 3 days—how did it become the Chinese darknet?!

The Chinese version of the darknet—too well-versed in what young people want

Xianyu doesn’t want to compete with Xiaohongshu, but it really has no tricks left

600 million people are looking for services on it—when the economy gets worse, does the “Chinese version of the darknet” get hotter?