Author: Tony (@0xtony0x), Investor at Primitive Ventures
Contribution: Dovey (@DoveyWan), Founder of Primitive Ventures
The Tension of Currency: The Convergence of Three Layers of Paradigm
Currency is one of humanity's most profound civilizational inventions. It is not just a medium of exchange, but an abstract carrier of order. When I pay someone to clean my room, I am essentially transferring my own entropy to the other party, while currency acts as an ordered intermediary, making disorder orderly. On a macro level, currency is a gigantic distributed database, an order mechanism invented by humanity to solve the most core resource allocation problem of civilization.
The greatness of Bitcoin lies in the fact that it is not only a peer-to-peer currency, but also a peer-to-peer energy and computing power distribution system, making global energy arbitrage possible:
Direct computing power to the cheapest energy.
Arbitrage electricity costs on a global scale;
Transforming dispersed energy into an ordered ledger solidified through PoW.
In the future, we believe that the vast majority of economic activities will be carried out through interactions between machines and machines, as well as between machines and humans. In this generation of intelligent machine economies, the forms of currency will be more diverse and liquid, but the second law of thermodynamics of currency will always hold: the protocol that can coordinate machines with the least increase in entropy will become the currency order of the future.
Today, we stand at the intersection of three technological curves:
Artificial Intelligence Large Language Models empower machines with cognition
Robot hardware has significantly reduced costs under the positive externalities of the development of the consumer electronics and electric vehicle industry chain.
Cryptographic Network provides an instant, borderless, trustless, and intermediary-free value settlement platform.
Under the combined effects of this triple paradigm shift, the opportunity for the next generation trillion-dollar smart machine economy is quietly unfolding just like when Bitcoin was first born
From Open Network to Open Machine
OM1 and FABRIC —— Providing consensus, execution, and settlement for the machine economy.
In the context of cryptocurrency, OpenMind is building an open-source execution layer and settlement layer for the machine economy, running on a brand new consensus layer above it:
Consensus Layer → Machine's Shared World State
A globally agreed "world state": who is where, what is happening, and what resources are available.
The natural language data bus of OM1 generates logical states with integrated sensor streams.
FABRIC provides cryptographic proofs for location, task execution, etc., forming verifiable records.
Execution Layer → OM1 Cognitive Stack
Similar to how Android and iOS are operating systems for mobile phones, OM1 is a modular, open-source robot operating system that transforms inputs into actions.
AI models are responsible for understanding perception, planning tasks, and low-latency control, just as smart contracts are responsible for executing business logic.
Settlement Layer → The Endgame and Payment of FABRIC
Verify the completion of tasks, record proof, and settle through stablecoins.
Update the shared world state so that all agents maintain the same reality.
In other words, OM1 is the pluggable brain of the robots, and FABRIC is their shared wallet and identity. They unite fragmented groups of machines into a permissionless, composable global workforce:
Composability: Like DeFi protocols, OM1 enables sensors, actuators, and AI modules to interoperate across platforms;
Permissionless access: Anyone can deploy robot applications without needing OEM approval;
Global Distribution: Just like Bitcoin nodes, robots running OM1/FABRIC can collaborate globally without barriers;
Interoperability Layer: OM1 and FABRIC connect different models and capabilities of robots into a unified network.
Open source is sovereignty. The open-source intelligent machine network can transcend geopolitical barriers, becoming a super-sovereign layer of the global robot supply chain. Just as open-source blockchain has defeated closed financial networks, open-source models (such as DeepSeek) are challenging closed foundational models, and the open-source robot stack will inevitably prevail, as the compounding speed of open source far exceeds any closed moat can withstand, as Liang Wenfeng said:
"In the face of disruptive technology, a closed-source moat is only temporary. Even if OpenAI remains closed-source, it cannot prevent others from surpassing it. Therefore, we accumulate value within the team; colleagues accumulate knowledge through growth, forming an organization and culture, which is our moat."
—— Liang Wenfeng, Founder of DeepSeek
The first humanoid robot built on the Openmind Fabric Network
Machine Economy: A New Tradable System
Just as currency has been the order of resource allocation since ancient times, the OpenMind network will become the resource coordination protocol for the machine economy:
M2M (Machine to Machine): Transactions between robots, essentially resource allocation events, where they bid and settle on electricity, payloads, sensor access, materials, storage, and even spectrum bandwidth.
M2H (Machine to Human): Machines, as economic entities, can also transact directly with humans. For example, robots can pay port fees or settle delivery contracts with human operators.
Stablecoin: Serving as the final settlement layer between M2M and M2H.
In the AI era, what is consumed is not just computing power cycles, but the electricity, fuel, and goods that robots process in reality. Coordinating the flow of these energies and materials requires a neutral global arbitrage layer, just as Bitcoin does for the allocation of energy and computing power.
OpenMind's robotic dog interacts with people, filmed in Palo Alto.
Why did we bet early?
Our story with OpenMind began at the end of 2023. During a meeting on the Stanford campus, founder Jan Liphardt (Stanford Bioengineering Professor) shared with us a nearly sci-fi vision: the blockchain will become the monetary order layer for machine-native agents.
It sounds like science fiction, but we envision a future where blockchain will become the underlying infrastructure for machine-to-machine and machine-to-human activities, where exchanges can be securely verified and settled without friction.
In our view, the supranational open-source smart machine protocol is the intersection of multiple theses from Primitive Ventures:
Programmable Currency Stacked with Programmable Robots
The combination of open-source software and the global hardware supply chain
A borderless cryptocurrency network bypasses geopolitical friction, allowing global hardware and open-source software to coordinate through programmable currency and machines, forming optimal resource allocation and arbitrage layers.
Founder Fit: The Combination of Culture and Strategy
When we only had two people and a PPT at OpenMind, we chose to invest. This is not a passive check, but a bet on a sovereign robotic network civilization. Driven by the "Great Beauty Act", automated and trustworthy allied supply chains have become the trend. OpenMind's open-source, sovereign stack turns these constraints into advantages: enabling developers to globalize procurement, verify sources on-chain, and coordinate economic activities across borders.
To build a global sovereign machine network, founders must be able to navigate the complexities of culture and geopolitics. Jan is such a rare candidate: a versatile scholar from France, raised in post-Cold War Europe, fluent in German, and engaged in research at Stanford. The combination of cultural fluency and technical background is the best fit for constructing an intelligent sovereign machine network.
Jan showcased Openmind on the main stage at ETH Denver.
Ecological Status
Today, OpenMind is building the world's first sovereign machine economy stack for intelligent machines and humans:
Robot Company
Robostore (Unitree's main distributor in the United States) has incorporated OM1 + FABRIC into its robotics curriculum, covering more than 3,400 colleges and high schools.
Unitree and Deep Robotics provide OpenMind as a technical solution to distributors and authorize the official product video for FABRIC applications for crowdsourced evaluation; OpenMind is also the official distributor for both companies.
Academic Cooperation
Currently collaborating and conducting pilot programs with the Stanford Robotics Center, Berkeley Robotics Lab, Oxford Robotics Institute, National University of Singapore, and Seoul National University.
User Adoption
Pi Network (with over 50 million users, is one of the largest crypto platforms in the world) collaborates with OpenMind to promote the crowdsourcing of distributed robotic software.
If you are building the OpenMind ecosystem, feel free to contact us!
OpenMind's humanoid robot made its debut on Nasdaq, witnessing the official launch of the world's first "Humanoid and Embodied Intelligence ETF" alongside KraneShares.
This page may contain third-party content, which is provided for information purposes only (not representations/warranties) and should not be considered as an endorsement of its views by Gate, nor as financial or professional advice. See Disclaimer for details.
From Bitcoin to the machine economy, how does OpenMind build an intelligent machine economy?
Author: Tony (@0xtony0x), Investor at Primitive Ventures
Contribution: Dovey (@DoveyWan), Founder of Primitive Ventures
The Tension of Currency: The Convergence of Three Layers of Paradigm
Currency is one of humanity's most profound civilizational inventions. It is not just a medium of exchange, but an abstract carrier of order. When I pay someone to clean my room, I am essentially transferring my own entropy to the other party, while currency acts as an ordered intermediary, making disorder orderly. On a macro level, currency is a gigantic distributed database, an order mechanism invented by humanity to solve the most core resource allocation problem of civilization.
The greatness of Bitcoin lies in the fact that it is not only a peer-to-peer currency, but also a peer-to-peer energy and computing power distribution system, making global energy arbitrage possible:
In the future, we believe that the vast majority of economic activities will be carried out through interactions between machines and machines, as well as between machines and humans. In this generation of intelligent machine economies, the forms of currency will be more diverse and liquid, but the second law of thermodynamics of currency will always hold: the protocol that can coordinate machines with the least increase in entropy will become the currency order of the future.
Today, we stand at the intersection of three technological curves:
Under the combined effects of this triple paradigm shift, the opportunity for the next generation trillion-dollar smart machine economy is quietly unfolding just like when Bitcoin was first born
From Open Network to Open Machine
OM1 and FABRIC —— Providing consensus, execution, and settlement for the machine economy.
In the context of cryptocurrency, OpenMind is building an open-source execution layer and settlement layer for the machine economy, running on a brand new consensus layer above it:
In other words, OM1 is the pluggable brain of the robots, and FABRIC is their shared wallet and identity. They unite fragmented groups of machines into a permissionless, composable global workforce:
Open source is sovereignty. The open-source intelligent machine network can transcend geopolitical barriers, becoming a super-sovereign layer of the global robot supply chain. Just as open-source blockchain has defeated closed financial networks, open-source models (such as DeepSeek) are challenging closed foundational models, and the open-source robot stack will inevitably prevail, as the compounding speed of open source far exceeds any closed moat can withstand, as Liang Wenfeng said:
"In the face of disruptive technology, a closed-source moat is only temporary. Even if OpenAI remains closed-source, it cannot prevent others from surpassing it. Therefore, we accumulate value within the team; colleagues accumulate knowledge through growth, forming an organization and culture, which is our moat."
—— Liang Wenfeng, Founder of DeepSeek
The first humanoid robot built on the Openmind Fabric Network
Machine Economy: A New Tradable System
Just as currency has been the order of resource allocation since ancient times, the OpenMind network will become the resource coordination protocol for the machine economy:
In the AI era, what is consumed is not just computing power cycles, but the electricity, fuel, and goods that robots process in reality. Coordinating the flow of these energies and materials requires a neutral global arbitrage layer, just as Bitcoin does for the allocation of energy and computing power.
OpenMind's robotic dog interacts with people, filmed in Palo Alto.
Why did we bet early?
Our story with OpenMind began at the end of 2023. During a meeting on the Stanford campus, founder Jan Liphardt (Stanford Bioengineering Professor) shared with us a nearly sci-fi vision: the blockchain will become the monetary order layer for machine-native agents.
It sounds like science fiction, but we envision a future where blockchain will become the underlying infrastructure for machine-to-machine and machine-to-human activities, where exchanges can be securely verified and settled without friction.
In our view, the supranational open-source smart machine protocol is the intersection of multiple theses from Primitive Ventures:
Founder Fit: The Combination of Culture and Strategy
When we only had two people and a PPT at OpenMind, we chose to invest. This is not a passive check, but a bet on a sovereign robotic network civilization. Driven by the "Great Beauty Act", automated and trustworthy allied supply chains have become the trend. OpenMind's open-source, sovereign stack turns these constraints into advantages: enabling developers to globalize procurement, verify sources on-chain, and coordinate economic activities across borders.
To build a global sovereign machine network, founders must be able to navigate the complexities of culture and geopolitics. Jan is such a rare candidate: a versatile scholar from France, raised in post-Cold War Europe, fluent in German, and engaged in research at Stanford. The combination of cultural fluency and technical background is the best fit for constructing an intelligent sovereign machine network.
Jan showcased Openmind on the main stage at ETH Denver.
Ecological Status
Today, OpenMind is building the world's first sovereign machine economy stack for intelligent machines and humans:
If you are building the OpenMind ecosystem, feel free to contact us!
OpenMind's humanoid robot made its debut on Nasdaq, witnessing the official launch of the world's first "Humanoid and Embodied Intelligence ETF" alongside KraneShares.