On August 19, Mo Shen Intelligent—an embodied intelligence firm—closed a nearly 500 million yuan Pre-A+ round. The syndicate included state-owned funds, industrial investors, and existing backers. By the end of the first half of the year, its valuation had multiplied tenfold. The market rewarded this company with a speed that traditional startup financing rarely grants. But what exactly did that capital purchase? A faster path to deployment? A monopoly on talent? Or simply the right to build within a walled garden?
When I read the announcement, I felt a familiar tension. In 2017, I withdrew from a lucrative ICO to audit 0x’s relayer architecture. I learned then that true freedom is not about access to capital—it is about permissionless access to the infrastructure of value. The Mo Shen case is a reminder that even in the most cutting-edge fields—embodied AI, robotics, autonomy—the old gatekeepers still demand rent. Code is the only permission we truly need. Yet here, the permission was bought with yuan, not written in bytes.
Embodied intelligence refers to AI systems that operate physically in the world—robots, drones, autonomous vehicles. These systems require massive datasets, real-world testing, and hardware integration. The capital intensity is undeniable. But the financing structure matters as much as the technology. A round like this creates a fiduciary duty to investors whose primary goal is return, not public good. The protocol, by contrast, has no such obligation. It simply executes rules. The question is: can embodied intelligence ever be built on permissionless protocols, or will it remain a playground for the well-connected?
Let me ground this in a technical reality I know well. In 2020, I modeled undercollateralized lending on Aave’s mechanics for Southeast Asian underbanked populations. The system was efficient but replicated exclusion through over-collateralization. The same pattern appears here: wealth begets access. The 10x valuation is not a signal of technological superiority—it is a signal of concentration. The network effect of capital is real, but it is not the only network effect. We build in silence so the network can speak. Mo Shen’s investors may be loud, but the protocol’s logic is quiet and persistent.
Now, consider the core technological challenge. Embodied AI requires data—lots of it. Where does that data come from? Today, it comes from proprietary training runs, closed simulations, and controlled environments. The data is siloed. The models are black boxes. The hardware is locked. This is precisely the opposite of the Web3 thesis. A decentralized alternative would involve tokenized access to robot fleets, on-chain provenance of training data, and DAO-governed upgrades. I have seen early prototypes of this in my work on the Provenance Layer for AI content verification. We built a system that costs $0.01 per verification to prove human origin. The same principle applies to embodied intelligence: every action, every sensor reading, every decision could be logged on an immutable ledger. Trust is not given; it is verified.
But here is the contrarian angle. The pragmatist will say: embodied AI is too complex, too hardware-dependent, too latency-sensitive for blockchain. They are right today. But they are missing the point. The infrastructure for decentralized physical networks is being built—layer-0 protocols for IoT, zero-knowledge proofs for private data, and decentralized storage for large files. The question is not whether it can be done, but whether it will be done before the centralized incumbents become too entrenched. Mo Shen’s 10x valuation is a warning: the window for permissionless alternatives is closing. Patience is the validator of true intent.
I recall a moment in 2022, after the Terra collapse, I retreated to a cabin in the Scottish Highlands. I wrote a personal essay titled “The Burden of Belief.” The industry had betrayed its promise. I felt the weight of being an evangelist when reality fails. That same weight applies here. The embodied intelligence community is building amazing things, but they are building them on foundations that can be turned off, censored, or taxed. The protocol remembers what the market forgets. When the next bear market comes, will Mo Shen’s valuation hold? Or will it be revealed as a casino chip?
From my experience consulting for a UK pension fund in 2024, I learned that institutional capital is not inherently evil—it is just inertial. It seeks stability. But stability without freedom is a cage. The pension fund eventually adopted a nuanced view of Bitcoin as a neutral reserve asset, not just a speculative hedge. That was a small victory for permissionless values. The fight for embodied intelligence is similar. We need to translate the language of decentralized protocols into the language of builders. We need to show that a robot controlled by a smart contract is more trustworthy than a robot controlled by a company’s boardroom.
Let me be specific. Imagine a fleet of delivery robots owned by a DAO. Each robot stake is a token. Each delivery is verified by oracles and stored on-chain. The robot’s software updates are voted on by token holders. The data it collects is public but anonymized. This is not a far-fetched fantasy. There are already projects building decentralized ride-sharing, drone swarms, and sensor networks. The missing piece is the embodied brain—the AI that makes decisions. But that too can be open-source and contributed to by a global community. Freedom arrives when the gatekeepers go dark.
Now, the contrarian within me must speak. The market is currently sideways. Consolidation favors the established. Mo Shen’s investors are betting on a future where hardware and software are integrated behind a single corporate veil. They are not wrong to believe that this model is more capital-efficient. But capital efficiency is not the same as resilience. A decentralized network of embodied intelligence nodes may be slower to build, but it cannot be captured by a single point of failure. Stillness reveals the signal beneath the noise. In this sideways market, the signal is clear: the structures we build today will determine whether tomorrow’s robots serve the few or the many.
From my own journey—from auditing 0x to leading the Provenance Layer project—I have learned that the most important permission is the one we give ourselves. Mo Shen’s team is talented. Their technology is promising. But the financing model is a relic of a world that is fading. The blockchain is not just a ledger; it is a new social contract. It says: we will build in the open, we will verify instead of trust, we will let the code speak. Embodied intelligence will be the next frontier of this contract. The question is whether we will build it with permissionless protocols or with permissioned capital.
Liberation is not a promise; it is a state. We must choose to enter that state. The 10x valuation of Mo Shen is a mirror reflecting our own choices. Do we want to be spectators in a world of programmed robots, or do we want to be participants in a network of autonomous agents? The answer is not in a funding round. It is in the hundreds of lines of code that define a smart contract. It is in the quiet work of a protocol developer who refuses to ask for permission. The protocol remembers what the market forgets. The market will forget the 10x multiple. The protocol will remember whether we built with integrity.
I will end with a rhetorical question, not a summary. When the embodied intelligence revolution arrives, who will own the intelligence? The corporation that bought it with yuan, or the network that earned it with proof?