The secret winner behind OpenClaw: Escaped from OpenSea, he made a fortune by selling interfaces

Original by David, Deepwater TechFlow

OpenClaw's on fire, but it's the company that's making money in this heat that you probably haven't heard of:

OpenRouter。

With OpenClaw access to various AI models to work, Claude, GPT, DeepSeek each has their own fees and interfaces. What OpenRouter does is wrap these models together, and you use them together, and it makes a difference。

The man in the business, Alex Atallah. His company had just taken a 16z award of $40 million, which is now valued at $500 million。

What you may not know is that the last company he started was OpenSea, the largest NFT exchange in the world, with a peak estimate of over $13 billion。

BUT HE CHOSE TO LEAVE AT NFT'S HOTTEST HOUR, A FEW MONTHS LATER, WHEN THE NFT MARKET COLLAPSED。

NOW HE'S MAKING MONEY IN THIS HOT TIDE AGAIN。

From liquidity aggregation to large model aggregation

Alex Atallah, Graduate of Stanford Computer Department。

In 2018, he co-founded OpenSea with Devin Finzer. It's easy to do: people make NFTs, they provide a place for people to buy and sell, 2.5% for each deal。

OpenSea does not produce NFT, does not fire NFT, only provides shelf, aggregate liquidity。

In 2021, the NFT heat surged, boring apes and so on, and NFT gradually became a popular symbol. OpenSea was at a peak of $5 billion a month, and Forbes estimated that he and Finzer together had $2.2 billion。

IN JULY 2022, HE QUIT THE CTO AND SAID HE'D DO SOMETHING NEW。

After that, we all know that the NFT crashed, the market went into the ice age, and OpenSea's own business was chicken hair. But there's always someone paying for the feast while Alex leaves before the music is over。

In 2023, he started doing something called OpenRouter. One sentence is clear:

THE LARGE MODEL'S POLYMER ROUTE PLATFORM, WHICH PUTS HUNDREDS OF MODEL APIS BEHIND AN INTERFACE, AND THE DEVELOPERS COME IN AND CALL AT 5% OF EACH CHARGE。

You might ask, why don't you just look for Openai, Anthony, Claude, GPT

Sure。

But now maybe no one's just using a model, writing code in Claude, searching data in Gemini, throwing money-saving work at DeepSeek.

Not to mention that many users want to use Claude and GPT, there's no direct connection from home to API。

So OpenRouter is the least resistance. One interface, more than 500 models, uniform format, automatic switching, and a single key。

You probably didn't notice when you used OpenClaw, the default provider in the configuration file, before it was OpenRouter。

Source: Know-your-user Feng controls calcium Division

You turn Claude, DeepSeek, please come to him first, then to the model manufacturer. Even OpenClaw documents:

If the system does not know your API key format, default on OpenRouter。

How fast is this business going

In October 2024, every month after OpenRouter the money was $800,000. By May 2025, that figure had become $8 million。

Seven months, ten times。

After a year, he had over $100 million in money. He takes 5% of it to 5 million, and the team is less than 10。

source: sacra.com

a16z wrote an industry report with his data called "The status of the 100 trillion Token " ; Stripe customised him with a billing system。

And with this year’s OpenClaw fire, more developers and enthusiasts coming in, burning token, there is an inevitable need to call on big models, and this is totally fueling OpenRouter’s business。

and, a16z voted for the company, giving a valuation of 500 million。

A man who sells shovels is again a man who sells shovels。

Hot spots are different. Same pattern

You look closely at Alex and these two businesses are actually the same structure。

OpenSea did a business of not casting NFT, putting the NFT that was made by someone else in a place where the buyer and seller came in and traded, and he smoked 2.5%. OpenRouter's business is not a training model, putting other people's models in a place where developers come in and he smokes five percent。

THE WHOLE MARKET STRUCTURE IS VERY SIMILAR:

The supply side was extremely dispersed, and the demand-side buyer did not know where to find it, while he was standing in the middle on the shelf。

In 2021, how far was the NFT? Dozens of chains, hundreds of projects, tens of thousands of new series per day. You want to buy a boring ape, you can't go through every project in the network. Opensea gather them together, you pick and buy, and sell them to you at home。

How dispersed is the Big Model in 2025? OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta, DeepSeek, Mistral, 101, just a dozen, plus hundreds of open source communities。

You're doing the best thing with Claude today, and Gemini's getting a new edition of the search tomorrow, and DeepSeek's price is down by half. The interface is changed every time。

Atallah said one thing to himself and made this logic very clear:

"OpenSea combines very dispersed stocks in one place, and AI looks very much like that today."

HE DOESN'T NEED TO KNOW WHICH NFT WILL RISE OR WHICH MODEL WILL WIN. ALL HE NEEDS TO KNOW IS THAT THE MORE THE SUPPLY SPREADS, THE MORE VALUABLE THE BROKER IS。

And, interestingly, nodes of time。

When he left in July 2022, OpenSea ' s valuation was still high, and the NFT monthly turnover fell from peaks, but no one felt it was falling. He said he wanted to do something new from zero to one, and six months later ChatGPT was released, and the age of big models began。

What did he see, or was he lucky

I don't know. But one thing is certain:

At the beginning of 2023, when he was registered to OpenRouter, there were virtually no big models of AI by-products on the market。He was there by the time everyone realized the need for a unified interface。

LAST TIME HE DID THE SAME THING ON THE NFT TRACK. HE'S ALREADY THE BIGGEST PLATFORM BY THE TIME EVERYONE GETS IN。

FIRE IS NOT AI, IS IT IMPORTANT

The question that most people ask in every round of heat is: What fires

Which NFT in 2021 will rise, which meme coin in 2024, which AI application will run out in 2025, which lobster in 2026 will do anything。

Atallah may ask different questions. I think his mind's going back, whatever it isWhere will the money come from

These two issues seem to differ little, and are in fact completely different ways of gambling。

"What's going on?" You have to guess. Boring apes will rise, PEPE will be 100 times more, an AI product will be next ChatGPT. That's right. That's right. The majority of people experience the latter。

You don't have to guess where the money comes from. NFT went up, the deal happened on OpenSea, and he charged the fees. The more the AI model war gets, the more the developers need a single interface to switch back and forth, the more OpenRouter is busy。

No bets on who wins this war will be long。

In fact, the most profitable in each cycle, in any industry, is basically the platform。

Gold hunters come and go, water sellers keep collecting money。

But I don't think it's enough to say "sell water" and "sell shovels." There's a bunch of dead shovel sellers, AtallahHe's always stuck in the aggregate position。

It's not just a tool to get through. You have to be the one who brings the scattered supplies together. The more decentralized the supply, the higher the cost of switching, the more price-fixing will be available to the central polymer layer。

And that explains why he went in at the earliest. Because the conglomerate business has one characteristic:

Those who arrived first signed the supplies, and then they were hard to follow。

So what Atallah did was I summed up two words:

First, if you don't guess who wins, you find the only way through. Second, the road had been fixed when others had not realized the need for it。

A bull never picks a table

Now, I think the two voices around me are particularly loud。

One says that AI Agent is a toy, and OpenClaw is useless except token; the other says it's another wave of AI, and no one remembers it after three months。

Perhaps both views are correct。

But for someone like Alex Atallah, actually don't care。

OpenClaw worked, he was collecting money. You don't think lobster's off today. Token's been burning for two weeks。

Someone thinks NFT is dirty, is Ponzi, is a scam. He did 13.3 billion valuations on it. Some people think AI Agent is foam, is impotent, doesn't see business models. He did 500 million-dollar valuations on it...

The Bulls may not really need us to see his track。

NFT THAT TABLE, HE MADE MONEY. AI THIS TABLE, HE'S EARNING AGAIN. WHAT'S NEXT? NOBODY KNOWS。

But I guess he'll still collect tickets at the door。