On February 22, news broke that the open-source AI agent framework OpenClaw recently drew attention due to a token controversy. During the renaming process, the project’s account was hijacked, and scammers took the opportunity to issue a fake Solana-based token called CLAWD, whose market value once soared to 16 million USD before plummeting more than 90% after the founder denied any association.

OpenClaw was initiated by developer Peter Steinberger and was originally named "Clawdbot." It was later renamed "Moltbot" briefly after receiving a trademark warning due to its similarity to Anthropic’s model Claude, before finally settling on the name OpenClaw. During the period when the old GitHub and X accounts were being released and the new accounts had not yet been handed over, scammers registered the accounts and launched the CLAWD token, triggering speculative trading.

Steinberger subsequently publicly stated that he would never issue tokens and emphasized that any projects issuing tokens in his name are scams. After the incident, the official OpenClaw Discord server has completely banned mentioning keywords such as "Bitcoin" and "crypto," even in neutral technical discussions. Some users were removed for referencing Bitcoin block heights as benchmarks.

Currently, Steinberger has joined OpenAI to lead the personal agent department, while OpenClaw operates as an independent open-source foundation. Despite ongoing controversies, the project community continues to grow, but the official stance is clear: to keep a distance from the crypto field.