Crypto Bear Market Startup Guide Part 2: The Token Relay Station: Exchanging Crypto Tokens for AI Tokens

Author | Wenser (@ وینسر 2010)

Following the discussion on the pre-market stock-کرپٹو price spread market in “The First Guide to Starting a Business in a Crypto Bear بازار,” Kalshi promptly completed a new funding round with a $220 billion valuation, and its market position subsequently rose.

The second direction of this series focuses on a more niche, higher-frequency, yet often overlooked segment by کرپٹو natives who are increasingly accompanied by AI in their daily lives—the اے آئی ٹوکن Relay Station.

This track itself is not new. Over the past two years, numerous relay services selling “low-cost APIs” have emerged both domestically and internationally, from the 9.9 yuan monthly cards on Xianyu to the “stable channels” whispered about in various developer communities. The scale of this business has long exceeded most people’s imagination. However, from the perspective of the crypto market, it has two severely underestimated dimensions: First, using cryptocurrency (Crypto ٹوکن) to directly purchase AI Tokens is a structural entry point that has not yet been fully developed; second, packaging and selling domestic models like Qwen, Kimi, GLM, and Minimax to overseas users is a “reverse export” path that has not yet become mainstream.

Later, we will also mention the cross-border transformation of “elite entrepreneur” Alex Atallah, who decisively left OpenSea in 2022 and subsequently founded OpenRouter. Not because the project itself is legendary, but importantly, it has opened up a new, severely underestimated business path for crypto entrepreneurs—the yet-to-be-truly-connected bridge between Crypto Tokens and AI Tokens.

Not All Tokens Are Created Equal: The Underlying Structure of the AI x Crypto Revolving Door

An AI Token relay station is essentially an API aggregation and forwarding layer. Users obtain a unified key through the platform, which then forwards requests to official channels like OpenAI and Anthropic.

The demand is real: bypassing credit card registration barriers and reducing access costs. It seems low-barrier, but the waters run deep.

According to a research team’s tests on 17 third-party API platforms, 45.83% exhibited “identity mismatch”—users paid for GPT-4 prices but actually ran on cheap open-source models, with performance gaps reaching up to 40%, which most users were unaware of.

This explains why many ultra-low-cost platforms frequently shut down. It’s not active fraud, but rather the upstream account pool suffering batch bans, causing the cost structure to collapse instantly. The large-scale account ban wave triggered by the Claude protocol upgrade in March 2026 is a typical chain reaction.

Three types of supply sources: “White goods” from formal corporate contract purchases, “gray goods” from bulk-registered account pools, and “black goods” from black card top-ups or stolen accounts. The vast majority of ultra-low-cost platforms rely on the latter two.

Users chase low prices, but behind low prices lie unstable supply sources and hidden data risks. This contradiction currently has no solution.

The Three Gates of Token Relay Stations: The Regular Army, Partners, and Lone Wolves

OpenRouter is the most noteworthy case in this track. Founder Alex Atallah, co-founder and former CTO of OpenSea, has a Stanford CS background, is an alumnus of both YC and HF0, and was among Forbes’ first NFT billionaires. He co-founded OpenSea with Devin Finzer in 2018, completing one of the most representative wealth accumulations in crypto history by 2021. In 2022, as the NFT market entered a prolonged downturn, Atallah pivoted to AI infrastructure.

From the “unified trading layer” for the NFT market to the “unified routing layer” for LLMs, the product intuition is consistent—building a standardized aggregation entry point on top of a fragmented supply side.

OpenRouter now integrates over 60 inference service providers and 300+ models, with over 4.2 million global users and over 250,000 integrated applications. A single unified OpenAI-compatible interface allows developers to access any mainstream model with minimal friction.

Furthermore, the Crypto payment path is also a rarely explored area.

Notably, the OpenRouter platform also offers a channel to purchase Credits via cryptocurrency through Coinbase Business Checkouts. Users can top up directly on-chain with USDC/ETH, bypassing traditional banking channels. Of course, the Crypto payment channel incurs an additional fee of approximately 5%, but for users seeking to avoid traditional payment friction, the premium is within an acceptable range.

OpenRouter,APIMart.ai، اورcabbagewwc.com represent three different entry postures in the current track.

OpenRouter follows a “crypto-native + global developer” route, with its core cards being compliance and founder credibility. APIMart differentiates itself through its breadth in multimodal coverage and depth in integrating domestic models, incorporating series like Qwen and ByteDance, making it particularly friendly for reverse export strategies. cabbagewwc represents domestic developer-oriented relay stations, deeply cultivating localized operations and RMB-denominated services, and is the closest link to domestic model supply sources.

Together, these three constitute a complete value chain from supply procurement, protocol aggregation, to crypto payments. On this chain, no player has yet truly connected all the links.

The Path of Token Reverse Export: Selling Domestic Cost-Effective Models to the World

If Crypto payments represent “entry differentiation,” then reverse export falls under “supply differentiation.”

Following the common sense that refined processing profits far exceed rough processing, the profit margin for the latter is naturally even more astonishing.

Taking early 2026 data as a reference: The price for Qwen3.5 per million tokens is as low as 0.8 RMB, approximately 0.11 USD, which is 1/18th of Gemini 3 Pro’s price. Compared to Claude Sonnet 4.6’s input price of 3 USD, the difference exceeds 27 times.

GLM-5 achieved a 77.8% score on the programming benchmark SWE-Bench Verified, surpassing Gemini 3 Pro and approaching Claude Opus 4.5, while its API price is merely a fraction of the latter’s. Kimi K2.5’s cumulative revenue in nearly 20 days since launch has already exceeded its total for 2025.

The accessibility of these models overseas is relatively extremely low: registration barriers, payment restrictions, language interfaces, and the information gap among overseas developers regarding the capabilities of domestic models constitute an invisible entry barrier.

This is precisely the survival space for reverse export relay stations.

The specific operation could involve bulk purchasing model API quotas domestically in RMB, exposing an OpenAI-compatible interface externally through a protocol conversion layer, pricing in USDT/USDC, and selling to overseas developers and startup teams. Alibaba Cloud’s BaiLian Coding Plan provides a cost reference: a bundled package of four major models—Qwen3.5, GLM-5, MiniMax M2.5, and Kimi K2.5—costs new users only 7.9 RMB for the first month, providing 18,000 request credits. Mapping this to overseas markets and selling at USD prices offers considerable profit margins.

Three Hidden Concerns Behind the Opportunity: Capital, Resources, and Compliance Barriers

Let’s not blindly hype. Before this business can truly be implemented, several barriers must be squarely faced.

Capital Barrier. Bulk purchasing domestic model API quotas, building the technical forwarding layer, and maintaining overseas servers and Crypto payment channels all require upfront capital investment. More crucially is liquidity management—exchange rate fluctuations and friction exist between Crypto receipts and RMB payments. Without a mature working capital plan, cash flow cycles can easily become problematic.

Resource Channels. Stable domestic model API procurement channels are core assets. Formal channels mean establishing business partnerships with model vendors or cloud platforms, requiring time and qualifications; the account pool route faces ongoing ban risks and compliance hazards. Simultaneously, the ability to reach overseas users is equally indispensable—cold starting on channels like Twitter/X, Reddit, Discord, and Telegram is a real barrier for teams without overseas community operation experience.

Legal Compliance. Risks come from both ends. Model service terms often restrict resale; the vast majority of mainstream vendors explicitly prohibit commercial resale of APIs, keeping the account pool model in a state of contractual breach risk legally. Data security and cross-border compliance: selling domestic model services to overseas users involves data export compliance requirements, which need careful assessment in the current regulatory environment. Crypto receipts may also trigger VASP licensing requirements in some jurisdictions.

Another point: There is ample evidence within the industry that some relay platforms package and sell user prompt data for model training. This is not only a legal risk but also a commercial landmine that would directly destroy user trust once exposed.

The barriers are not technical, but lie in resource integration and risk management. Teams capable of simultaneously handling these four tasks—domestic cheap model procurement channels, OpenAI-compatible protocol conversion, Crypto payment channels, and overseas user operations—are almost non-existent in the current market.

This is both the opportunity and the reality of the difficulty.

From Opening Memberships to Token Relays: The AI Sales Landscape is Expanding

From Alex Atallah pivoting to found OpenRouter after the NFT downturn, to a group of domestic developers quietly building relay stations serving tens of thousands of users, the very existence of this business is a practical answer to the question, “What can survive in a bear market?”: It doesn’t rely on Token speculation, doesn’t rely on funding narratives, but generates real revenue from actual API call volume.

Deep waters don’t mean you can’t swim. The key is to measure how deep the water is before diving in.

تجویز کردہ پڑھنا

First Guide to Starting a Business in a Crypto Bear بازار: The Pre-Market Stock-Crypto Price Spread Market

From 5 Cents per kWh Chinese Electricity to 45 Yuan API Export Packages: Tokens Are Becoming the New Currency Unit

After Using Various Unscrupulous Relays, I Flipped the Table! A Guide to Building a Relay Station from Scratch!

یہ مضمون انٹرنیٹ سے لیا گیا ہے: Crypto Bear Market Startup Guide Part 2: The Token Relay Station: Exchanging Crypto Tokens for AI Tokens

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