OpenClaw Founder Bans Crypto Talk on Discord After $16 Million Fake-Token Scam

OpenClaw is an open-source AI agent framework launched by Peter Steinberger in November 2025 under the name Clawdbot. The team was asked to rename it because the name too closely resembled Anthropic’s Claude. After the project went viral, its brand accounts and users’ wallets became targets, highlighting impersonation and supply-chain risks in the open-source AI ecosystem.

On February 22, 2026, Steinberger confirmed that OpenClaw had imposed a blanket ban on cryptocurrency discussions in its Discord server. During a renaming window in January, scammers hijacked the project’s old GitHub and X accounts to promote a fake $CLAWD token on Solana. Its market capitalization surged to $16 million within hours, then plunged by more than 90% after the project disavowed it, triggering weeks of harassment.