The Greatness of Money, where Three Worlds Colliding

Money is a human invention for “entropy transfer”: if I pay someone to clean my house, I’m effectively dumping my entropy onto that person by compensating him with money. At the economy level, money is a giant distributed database for resource allocation: who gets what and when. Bitcoin is not just P2P money but also a P2P energy and hashrate allocation system that makes global energy arbitrage possible:

• Routes compute to the cheapest energy source
• Arbitrages electricity costs globally
• Turns (diffused) energy into secured ledger (orderliness) via PoW

In the future of Machine to Machine and Machine to Mankind economy, the form of money will be more dynamic and fluid, but the 2nd law of thermodynamic for moneyness stays intact: the protocol that coordinates machines at the least friction rate will emerge as the best monetary system.

Currently, we are witnessing three technology curves are converging:

• AI gives machines cognition, so that machine will expand the limits of mankind
• Robotics hardware is cheaper and better than ever, thanks to 2 decades of consumer electronics & EV supply chains
• Crypto rails enable instant, borderless, trustless transactions between machines and human

In AI and robotics, the next trillion-dollar opportunity is unfolding exactly like the early days of Bitcoin, but now in the physical world.

From Open Networks to Open Machines

In crypto terms, OpenMind is building the open-source execution layer and settlement layer for the machine economy, on top of a new consensus layer:

1. Consensus Layer → Shared World State for Machines

• A global, agreed-upon “world state” — who’s where, what’s happening, and what resources are available.
• OM1’s Natural Language Data Bus and fused sensor streams create the logical state.
• FABRIC’s cryptographic proofs (location, task performance) provides verifiable records.

2. Execution Layer → OM1 Cognition Stack

• Just like how Android and IOS as the operating system for mobiles, OM1 is a modular, open-sourced operating system for robots that takes various inputs into action.
• AI models interpret perception, plan tasks, and drive low-latency control, similar to smart contracts executing business

3. Settlement Layer → FABRIC Finality & Payment

• Verifies completed tasks, records proofs, and settles in stablecoins.
• Updates the shared world state so all agents have the same reality.

In short, OM1 gives robots a plug-and-play brain and FABRIC gives them a common wallet and identity. Together, they turn fragmented machines into a cohesive, permissionless workforce that enables:

• Composability: in DeFi, protocols stack like Lego bricks; in robotics, OM1 makes sensors, actuators, and AI modules interoperable across different platforms.
• Permissionless access: anyone can deploy a robotics application without OEM gatekeeping.
• Global distribution: like Bitcoin nodes, robots running OM1/FABRIC can coordinate anywhere without borders.
• Interoperability layer: OM1 and FABRIC bridge the physical world by linking robots of different makes, models, and capabilities into one network.

Openness is a form of sovereignty: an open intelligent-machine network can operate across geographic fault lines and serve as a meta-sovereign layer for geo-arbitrage in the global robotics supply chain. Just as open source blockchains outpaced closed source financial networks and open source models (e.g., DeepSeek) are challenging closed source foundation models, open source robotics will outpace proprietary stacks because openness compounds innovation and distribution faster than any closed approach can match.

“In the face of disruptive technology, the moat formed by closed-source is temporary. Even if OpenAI keeps their source closed, it cannot prevent others from surpassing it. Therefore, we accumulate value in our team; our colleagues grow in this process, accumulating a lot of know-how, forming organizations and cultures that can innovate, which is our moat”

— Wenfeng Liang, founder of Deepseek

The Machine Economy as a Tradable Economy

Just as money was invented for resource allocation, OpenMind network will become the resource allocator for Machines:

• M2M (Machine-to-Machine): transactions are resource-allocation events in which robots bid for and settle electricity, payload capacity, sensor access, materials, storage, and even spectrum/bandwidth.
• M2H (Machine-to-Mankind): similarly, as machines themselves also become economic actors, they could transact with human beings to acquire resources, for example a robot paying a port fee or settling a delivery contract with a human operator.
• Stablecoin: the final settlement layer across M2M and M2H economy.

In the AI era, it’s not just models consuming compute cycles. Robots, as the execution layer of AI, will physically consume electricity, fuel, and commodities to make things happen. Coordinating these flows calls for a neutral, global arbitrage layer, just as how Bitcoin allocates energy, hashrate, and computational resources.

Why we invested early

Our journey with OpenMind began in late 2023 with a sunny conversation on Stanford’s campus. Jan Liphardt, OpenMind’s founder and a Bioengineering professor at Stanford University, shared with us what sounded like a sci-fi vision: crypto as the monetary velocity layer for machine-native agents.

It sounded sci-fi, but we shared with him the vision where blockchain will become the infrastructure where machine-to-machine and machine-to-human activities are secured and settled. In our view this was the exact intersection that matches with our meta-thesis:

• Programmable money meets programmable machines.
• Open-source software meets global hardware supply chains.
• Borderless crypto rails route around geopolitical friction.

Founder Fit: Cultural Fluency Meets Strategic Range

We decided to back OpenMind when it was just two people and a slide deck, not a passive check but a conviction bet on a sovereign robotics network. As Big Beautiful Bill nudges spend toward automation and trusted, ally shored components, OpenMind’s open-source, sovereign stack turns those rules into an advantage by letting builders source globally, verify provenance on chain, and coordinate economic activities across borders.

To build such a global sovereign network for robotics, it requires the founder be able to navigate across cultural and geopolitical terrain. Jan possesses exactly this intellectual range and geopolitical sensitivity: he is a French polymath who grew up in a post-Cold War Europe, speaks fluent German, and conducts bioengineering research at Stanford. Such cultural fluency paired with technical legitimacy and flexibility is a rare asset in itself and the best fit to build a sovereign intelligent machine network.

Robotics Companies

• Robostore (Unitree’s major U.S. distributor) is bundling OM1 + FABRIC into robotics courseware for 3400+ colleges and high schools.
• Unitree and Deep Robotics are providing OpenMind as a technology solution to its distributors who need software, and licensing its official product videos for FABRIC app for crowdsourced evaluation; OpenMind is the official distributor for both companies.

Academic Collaboration:

• Active pilots and collaborations with Stanford Robotics Center, Berkeley Robotics Lab, Oxford Robotics Institute, National University of Singapore, and Seoul National University.

User Adoption

• Pi Network (50M+ users), one of the biggest crypto platform in the world, is partnering with OpenMind to crowdsource distributed robotics software.

If you’re building in the OpenMind ecosystem, reach out, we’d love to hear from you!

OpenMind’s humanoid joined KraneShares at Nasdaq to mark the launch of the world’s first Global Humanoid & Embodied Intelligence ETF.