By Tony (@0xtony0x), Investor at Primitive Ventures
Contributing: Dovey (@DoveyWan), Founder of Primitive Ventures
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:
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:
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.
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:
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:
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
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:
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
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:
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
Today, OpenMind is building the world's first sovereign machine economy stack for intelligent machines and humans:
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.


