The word “bitcoin” or any other mention of crypto will get you banned from the OpenClaw Discord. Not to spam, not to shill, but just to say it.
Peter Steinberger, the Austrian developer behind OpenClaw, the open source AI agent framework that has climbed over 200,000 GitHub stars since its release in late January, has enforced a blanket no-crypto rule on the project’s community server.
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.
Was blocked from @åbenklo Disagreement to say ‘bitcoin’ 🦞
CLASHD27 is multi-agent benchmark where the Bitcoin block height is only one clock (mod 27). No tokens.
Hypothesis: can we pre-weigh intent? If attention is measured, we bring trust to OpenClaw agents.@steipete Remove the block 🙏
— clashd27 (@blockapunk) 21 February 2026
Steinberger was aware of the ban in a follow-up response to the X post.
We have strict server rules that you accepted when you joined the server. No crypto mention at all is one of them, he said.
The rule comes after what happened at the end of January, when crypto almost destroyed the project from within.
The problems started after AI powerhouse Anthropic sent Steinberger a trademark notice over the project’s original name, Clawdbot, which the AI company claimed was too close to Anthropic’s own “Claude.” Steinberger agreed to rebrand.
But in the short seconds between dropping his old GitHub and X handles and securing the new ones, fraudsters seized both accounts and began promoting a fake token called $CLAWD on Solana.
This token reached $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 with harassment from traders who blamed him for not supporting the token.
“To all crypto people: please stop pinging me, stop harassing me,” he wrote on X at the time. “I will never make a coin. Any project that lists me as a coin owner is a FIDEL.”
“You are actively harming the project.”
To all crypto people:
Stop pinging me, stop harassing me.
I will never make a coin.
Any project that lists me as the coin owner is a FIDEL.
No, I do not accept fees.
You are actively harming the project.— Peter Steinberger 🦞 (@steipete) 27 January 2026
Security researchers at blockchain firm SlowMist and independent auditors found hundreds of OpenClaw instances exposed to the public internet without authentication, in part 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 skills repository, many aimed specifically at crypto traders.
Steinberger has since joined OpenAI to lead its personal agents division, with OpenClaw moving to an independent open source foundation. The project is flourishing.
But the crypto ban on Discord remains, leaving a scar from a week-long episode that showed how quickly speculative token culture can engulf a legitimate software project and all but bury it.
