Peter Steinberger, the Austrian developer behind OpenClaw - an open-source AI agent framework that surpassed 200,000 GitHub stars after launching in late January 2026 - has imposed a blanket prohibition on any cryptocurrency discussion in the project's Discord.
The ban follows a January incident in which crypto scammers hijacked his accounts during a rebrand, launched a fake token that briefly hit $16 million in market cap, and subjected him to weeks of harassment.
Steinberger confirmed the rule publicly after a user was banned simply for mentioning Bitcoin in a technical context.
"We have strict server rules," he wrote on X. "No crypto mention whatsoever is one of them."
What Happened
The crisis began on Jan. 27, 2026, when Anthropic sent a trademark notice over the project's original name, Clawdbot, citing similarity to its Claude model. Steinberger agreed to rebrand immediately.
In the roughly 10-second window between releasing his old GitHub and X handles and claiming new ones, scammers with automated bots seized both accounts.
They used the hijacked accounts to promote a fake token called $CLAWD on Solana (SOL), which reached $16 million in market capitalization within hours. When Steinberger publicly denied involvement, the token crashed more than 90%, wiping out late buyers while early snipers kept their profits.
"I will never do a coin," he wrote on X. "Any project that lists me as coin owner is a SCAM. You are actively damaging the project."
He later told Lex Fridman he came close to deleting the entire project.
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The Security Fallout
The episode exposed deeper vulnerabilities. Blockchain security firm SlowMist and independent researchers found hundreds of OpenClaw instances publicly accessible with no authentication.
Separately, researcher Paul McCarty identified 386 malicious "skills" - add-on scripts for OpenClaw agents - on the project's official repository between Feb. 1–3, most impersonating cryptocurrency trading tools targeting ByBit, Polymarket, and Axiom users.
A single attacker accumulated nearly 7,000 downloads before the skills were flagged.
Steinberger has since joined OpenAI to lead its personal agents division, with OpenClaw transitioning to an independent open-source foundation. The crypto ban on Discord remains in place.
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