By Tony (@0xtony0x), Investor at Primitive Ventures

Contributing: Dovey (@DoveyWan), Founder of Primitive Ventures

Monetary Tension: The Convergence of Three Paradigms

Money is humanity's most profound invention. It's not just a medium of exchange; it's an abstract carrier of order . When I pay someone to clean my house, I'm essentially transferring my entropy to them, and money acts as an ordering medium, bringing order to disorder. At a macro level, money is a giant distributed database, a mechanism of order invented by humans to solve civilization's core problem of resource allocation.

The great thing about Bitcoin is 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 sources;
• arbitrage electricity costs globally;
• Convert diffuse energy into an ordered ledger solidified through PoW.

In the future, we believe that the vast majority of economic activity will be carried out through the interaction between machines and humans. In this generation of intelligent machine economies, the forms of currency will become more diverse and fluid, but the second law of thermodynamics will always hold true: the protocol that can coordinate machines with minimal entropy increase will become the future monetary order.

Today, we are standing at the intersection of three technology curves:

• Artificial intelligence large language model gives machines cognition
• Robot hardware has significantly reduced costs due to the positive externalities of the development of the consumer electronics and electric vehicle industry chains.
• Crypto networks provide an instant, borderless, trustless, and intermediary-free value settlement platform

Under the combined force of these three paradigm shifts, the next generation of trillion-dollar intelligent machine economy opportunities are quietly unfolding, just like the birth of Bitcoin.

From open networks to open machines

OM1 and FABRIC — Providing consensus, execution, and settlement for the machine economy.

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

1. Consensus layer → shared world state among machines
   • A globally agreed “state of the world”: who is where, what is happening, and what resources are available.
   • OM1's natural language data bus and fused sensor streams generate logical states.
   • FABRIC provides cryptographic proof of location, task execution, etc., forming a verifiable record.
2. Execution Layer → OM1 Cognitive Stack
   • Similar to how Android and iOS are operating systems for mobile phones, OM1 is a modular, open-source operating system for robots that converts input into action.
   • AI models are responsible for understanding perception, task planning, and low-latency control, just as smart contracts are responsible for executing business logic.
3. Settlement layer → Fabric finality and payment
   • Verify task completion, record proof, and settle via 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 public wallet and identity. Together, they unite the fragmented machine population into a permissionless, composable global workforce:

• Composability: Like DeFi protocols, OM1 enables cross-platform interoperability between sensors, actuators, and AI modules.
• Permissionless access: Anyone can deploy robotic applications without OEM approval.
• Global distribution: Like Bitcoin nodes, robots running OM1/FABRIC can collaborate seamlessly around the world;
• Interoperability layer: OM1 and FABRIC connect robots of different models and capabilities into a unified network.

Open source equals sovereignty. Open source intelligent machine networks can transcend geopolitical divides and become a supranational layer in the global robotics supply chain. Just as open source blockchains defeated closed financial networks, and open source models (like DeepSeek) are challenging closed source infrastructure models, open source robotics stacks will inevitably prevail because the compounding rate of open source far exceeds that of any closed moat. As Liang Wenfeng said:

"In the face of disruptive technologies, the closed-source moat is only temporary. Even if OpenAI remains closed-source, it won't prevent others from surpassing it. Therefore, we accumulate value within the team; our colleagues accumulate knowledge as they grow, forming an organization and culture. This 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 a resource allocation mechanism since ancient times, the OpenMind Network will become a resource coordination protocol for the machine economy:

• M2M (machine to machine) : Transactions between robots are essentially resource allocation events, where they bid and settle for power, payload, sensor access, materials, storage, and even spectrum bandwidth.
• M2H (Machine to Human) : Machines, as economic agents, also transact directly with humans. For example, a robot pays port fees or settles a delivery contract with a human operator.
• Stablecoin : serves as the final settlement layer for M2M and M2H.

In the AI era, consumption isn't just about computing cycles; it's about the electricity, fuel, and commodities that robots consume in the real world. Coordinating these flows of energy and material requires a neutral global arbitrage layer, much like how Bitcoin distributes energy and computing power.

 OpenMind's robot dog interacting with a human, filmed in Palo Alto

Why we bet early

Our story with OpenMind began in late 2023. At a meeting on the Stanford campus, founder Jan Liphardt (Stanford Professor of Bioengineering) shared with us an almost science fiction vision: blockchain will become the monetary order layer for machine-native agents.

It sounds like science fiction, but we see a future together with him: blockchain will become the underlying infrastructure for machine-machine and machine-human activities, where exchanges can be securely verified and settled frictionlessly.

In our view, the concept of a hypersovereign open-source intelligent machine protocol is the intersection of multiple thesis ideas from Primitive Ventures:

• Programmable currency overlays programmable robots
• Combining open source software with a global hardware supply chain
• The borderless crypto network bypasses geopolitical friction, enabling global hardware and open source software to coordinate through programmable currency and machines, forming an optimal resource allocation and arbitrage layer.

Founder Fit: The Alignment of Culture and Strategy

We invested in OpenMind when it was just two people and a single PowerPoint presentation. This wasn't a passive check, but a civilizational bet on sovereign robotic networks . Driven by the "Great Beauty Act," automated and trusted, allied supply chains are becoming a trend. OpenMind's open-source, sovereign stack turns these constraints into advantages: enabling developers to source globally, verify provenance on-chain, and coordinate economic activity across borders.

To build a global sovereign machine network, founders must be able to navigate cultural and geographical complexities. Jan embodies this rare talent: a multifaceted French scholar who grew up in post-Cold War Europe, speaks fluent German, and conducts research at Stanford. This combination of cultural fluency and technical background is the perfect fit for building an intelligent sovereign machine network.

 Jan presents Openmind on the ETH Denver main stage

Ecological status

Today, OpenMind is building the world's first sovereign machine economy stack for intelligent machines and humans:

• Robotics Company
  • Robostore (Unitree's primary distributor in the United States) has incorporated OM1 + FABRIC into its robotics curriculum, reaching more than 3,400 colleges, universities, and middle schools.
  • Unitree and Deep Robotics provided OpenMind as a technical solution to their distributors and authorized the official product videos to FABRIC for crowdsourced evaluation; OpenMind is also the official distributor for both companies.
• Academic Cooperation
  • Pilot projects and collaborations are underway with the Stanford Robotics Center, Berkeley Robotics Lab, Oxford Robotics Institute, National University of Singapore, and Seoul National University.
• User adoption
  • Pi Network (one of the world's largest crypto platforms with over 50 million users) has partnered with OpenMind to facilitate crowdsourcing of distributed robotics software.

If you are building the OpenMind ecosystem, please contact us!

OpenMind's humanoid robot debuted on Nasdaq, marking the official launch of the world's first "Humanoid and Embodied Intelligence ETF" alongside KraneShares.