The Person Who Exited at the Peak of NFTs Is Now the Most Hidden Winner Behind OpenClaw

Geniuses never choose a table; they get a bite of the meat every time.

Author: David, Deep Tide TechFlow

OpenClaw has become popular, but among this wave of hype, the quiet money-maker is a company you might not have heard of:

OpenRouter.

Using OpenClaw requires connecting to various AI models to do the work—Claude, GPT, DeepSeek each have their own charges and interfaces. OpenRouter’s job is to bundle these models together, so you can use them through a unified platform, earning the difference in price.

The person behind this business is Alex Atallah. His company just raised $40 million led by a16z, now valued at $500 million.

What you might not know is that his previous company was OpenSea, the world’s largest NFT marketplace, which at its peak was valued over $13 billion.

But he chose to exit at the height of the NFT craze, just months before the market collapsed.

Now, he’s making money again in the AI boom.

From liquidity aggregation to large model aggregation

Alex Atallah graduated from Stanford’s Computer Science Department.

In 2018, he co-founded OpenSea with Devin Finzer. The business was simple: when others mint NFTs, they provide a place for buying and selling, taking a 2.5% fee per transaction.

OpenSea doesn’t produce NFTs, doesn’t speculate on them, only provides the shelf and aggregates liquidity.

In 2021, during the NFT boom, popular NFTs like Bored Apes became cultural symbols. OpenSea’s monthly trading volume once exceeded $5 billion. Forbes estimated that he and Finzer’s combined wealth was $2.2 billion.

In July 2022, he resigned as CTO, saying he wanted to build something new.

What happened next is well known: the NFT market crashed, entering a deep freeze, and OpenSea’s business was in disarray. But there are always those who pay the bill, and Alex exited before the music stopped.

By 2023, he started working on something called OpenRouter. To put it simply:

A large model aggregation routing platform that places hundreds of model APIs behind a single interface, allowing developers to call them with a 5% fee per use.

You might ask, why not just directly call OpenAI or Anthropic for models like Claude or GPT?

Of course, that’s possible.

But nowadays, no one uses just one model. Coding with Claude, researching with Gemini, saving money with DeepSeek—each company requires separate registration, separate payments, and their interfaces are different…

And many users want to use both Claude and GPT, but can’t connect directly from China.

So, OpenRouter is the easiest route. One interface, over 500 models, unified format, automatic switching, all handled with one key.

When you use OpenClaw, you might not notice that the default provider in the configuration file was previously OpenRouter.

Image source: Zhihu user Feng Control Alchemist

When you call Claude or DeepSeek, the request first goes to OpenRouter, then is forwarded to the model provider. Even OpenClaw’s documentation states:

If your API key format isn’t recognized, it defaults to OpenRouter.

How fast is this business growing?

By October 2024, $800,000 flows through OpenRouter each month. By May 2025, that number hits $8 million.

Tenfold in seven months.

In a year, over $100 million passes through his hands. He takes a 5% cut, earning $5 million, with a team of fewer than ten people.

Image source: sacra.com

a16z used his data to write an industry report titled “The Current State of AI with Trillions of Tokens”; Stripe even customized a billing system for him.

With the explosive popularity of OpenClaw this year, more developers and enthusiasts are jumping in, trying all kinds of tokens, which inevitably increases demand for calling various large models—fueling OpenRouter’s business even more.

Moreover, with a16z leading the investment, the valuation is $500 million.

Once again, a tool seller has become a major player.

Different hot topics, same model

Look closely at Alex’s two businesses, and their structures are actually quite similar.

OpenSea’s business is not minting NFTs but aggregating NFTs created by others—placing them in one place for buyers and sellers, taking a 2.5% fee. OpenRouter’s business is not training models but aggregating models trained by others—placing them in one place for developers to call, taking a 5% fee.

This approach seems to be his comfort zone, whether in NFTs or AI—the market structure is very similar:

Extremely fragmented supply, demand side buyers don’t know where to find supply, and he stands in the middle as the marketplace.

In 2021, NFT supply was highly dispersed: dozens of chains, hundreds of project teams, tens of thousands of new series daily. If you want to buy a Bored Ape, you can’t visit every project’s official site. OpenSea consolidates them, so you can browse and buy, and sellers can list and sell to you.

In 2025, large models are similarly dispersed: OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta, DeepSeek, Mistral, Zerynth—just the mainstream players number over a dozen, plus hundreds from open source communities.

Today, coding with Claude is best; tomorrow, Gemini’s new search features are better; the day after, DeepSeek drops prices by half. Every time you switch, you need to update the interface.

Atallah once explained this logic very clearly:

“OpenSea consolidates highly fragmented inventories into one place, and AI today looks very much like that.”

He doesn’t need to know which NFT will rise or which model will win. He only needs to know one thing: the more fragmented the supply, the more valuable the middleman.

And interestingly, the timing matters.

In July 2022, when he left, OpenSea’s valuation was still high; NFT monthly trading volume had fallen from its peak but was not collapsing. He said he wanted to “start from zero and build something new.” Six months later, ChatGPT was released, and the large model era began.

Did he see something, or was it luck?

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

When he registered OpenRouter in early 2023, the market for AI large model routing products was almost nonexistent. By the time everyone realized the need for a unified interface, he was already there.

The last time, he did the same in the NFT space. When everyone rushed in, he was already the biggest platform.

Is it important whether AI is hot or not?

In every hype cycle, most people ask: what will go viral?

In 2021, which NFT will rise; in 2024, which meme coin will multiply a hundredfold; in 2025, which AI app will emerge; in 2026, what can small lobsters do.

Atallah’s questions might be different. I think his thinking is: no matter what gets hot, where does the money flow from?

These two questions seem similar but are actually very different bets.

Betting on “what will go viral” means guessing right once. Bored Apes will rise, PEPE will multiply, a certain AI product will be the next ChatGPT. If you guess right, you get rich; if wrong, you lose everything. Most people have this experience.

Betting on “where the money flows from” doesn’t require guessing any one thing. When NFTs rise, transactions happen on OpenSea, and he earns fees. When AI model wars intensify, developers need a unified interface to switch back and forth, and OpenRouter gets busier.

It’s not about who wins but about betting that this battle will last a long time.

Looking back, the platforms that make the most money in each cycle are usually those at the center of this pattern.

People come and go, but the water seller keeps collecting fees.

But I think simply calling it “selling water” or “selling shovels” isn’t enough. Many shovel sellers have failed. Atallah succeeded by doing something more specific: he always positions himself at the point of aggregation.

It’s not enough to just build a tool to collect tolls—you have to be the one bringing dispersed supply together. The more fragmented the supply, the higher the switching costs, and the more pricing power the aggregation layer has.

This also explains why he entered early twice. Because in aggregation business, a key feature is:

The first to arrive signs the supply, making it hard for later entrants to catch up.

So, I summarize Atallah’s brilliance in two points:

First, don’t guess who will win—just find the intersection everyone must pass through. Second, build the road before others realize they need it.

Geniuses never pick a table

Now, I notice two dominant voices around me.

One says AI Agents are toys; installing OpenClaw is just burning tokens with no real use. The other says it’s just another wave of hype, and in three months, no one will remember.

Maybe both are right.

But for someone like Alex Atallah, it doesn’t matter.

Whether OpenClaw is useful or not, he’s collecting money. If you think the lobster is boring and stop using it, the tokens burned in the past two weeks are already in his pocket.

Some think NFTs are dirty, a Ponzi scheme, a scam. He built a company valued at $13.3 billion on that. Others see AI Agents as bubbles, hype, with no clear business model. He’s built a company valued at $500 million on that.

Geniuses might not need us to respect the track they’re on.

He made money on the NFT table. He’s making money on the AI table. What’s next, nobody knows.

But I guess, he’ll still be collecting tickets at the door.