The Crypto Ban That's Shocking the AI Community
Mentioning "bitcoin" or any cryptocurrency on the OpenClaw Discord server will get you banned immediately—not for spamming or shilling, but simply for saying the word. This strict rule comes after a weeks-long nightmare where crypto scammers nearly destroyed the viral AI project from the inside.
The Developer's Ordeal
Peter Steinberger, the Austrian developer behind OpenClaw, has enforced a blanket no-crypto rule on the project's community server. This open-source AI agent framework has surged past 200,000 GitHub stars since its release in late January, but the crypto chaos that followed almost led Steinberger to delete the entire project.
A user who recently mentioned bitcoin in passing—in the context of using block height as a clock for a multi-agent benchmark, not promoting a token—was blocked immediately. Steinberger was clear about the ban in a follow-up reply on X: "We have strict server rules that you accepted when you entered the server. No crypto mention whatsoever is one of them."
How Crypto Nearly Destroyed OpenClaw
The trouble started after AI powerhouse Anthropic sent Steinberger a trademark notice over the project's original name, Clawdbot, which the AI company argued was too close to Anthropic's own "Claude." Steinberger agreed to rebrand, but in the brief seconds between releasing his old GitHub and X handles and securing the new ones, scammers seized both accounts and began promoting a fake token called $CLAWD on Solana.
That token hit $16 million in market capitalization within hours. When Steinberger publicly denied any involvement, it crashed over 90%, wiping out late buyers. Early snipers walked away with profits, and Steinberger was left fielding harassment from traders who blamed him for not endorsing the token.
"To all crypto folks: please stop pinging me, stop harassing me," he wrote on X at the time. "I will never do a coin. Any project that lists me as coin owner is a SCAM. You are actively damaging the project."
Security Vulnerabilities Exposed
Security researchers at blockchain firm SlowMist and independent auditors found hundreds of OpenClaw instances exposed to the public internet with no authentication, partly because the tool's localhost trust model breaks when run behind a reverse proxy.
Separately, a researcher found 386 malicious "skills"—add-on scripts for OpenClaw agents—published on the project's skill repository, many targeting crypto traders specifically.
Moving Forward
Steinberger has since joined OpenAI to lead its personal agents division, with OpenClaw moving to an independent open-source foundation. The project is thriving, but the crypto ban on Discord stays, leaving a scar from a weeks-long episode that showed how fast speculative token culture can engulf a legitimate software project and nearly bury it.
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