The word “bitcoin” or any other mention of crypto will get you banned from the OpenClaw Discord. Not for spam, not for a shilling, but just saying it.
Peter Steinberger, the Austrian developer behind OpenClaw, the open source AI agent framework that has surpassed 200,000 GitHub stars since its release in late January, has enforced a general 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 immediately blocked.
Was blocked from @openclaw Discord for saying ‘bitcoin’ 🦞
CLASHD27 is a multi-agent benchmark where the Bitcoin block height is just one clock (mod 27). No tokens.
Hypothesis: can we previously weigh the intention? If attention is measured, we provide confidence to OpenClaw agents.@steipete Unlock 🙏
— clashed27 (@blockapunk) February 21, 2026
Steinberger was clear about the ban in a follow-up response to the X post.
We have strict server rules that you agreed to when you joined the server. No mention of crypto is one of them, he said.
The rule comes after what happened at the end of January, when cryptocurrencies almost destroyed the project from within.
The trouble began after AI powerhouse Anthropic sent Steinberger a trademark notice over the project’s original name, Clawdbot, which the AI company said was too similar to Anthropic’s own “Claude.” Steinberger agreed to change the name.
But in the few seconds between releasing their old GitHub and
That token reached $16 million in market capitalization in a matter of hours. When Steinberger publicly denied any involvement, it collapsed more than 90%, eliminating late buyers. Early snipers took profits, and Steinberger found himself harassed by traders who blamed him for not endorsing the token.
“To all the 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 the owner of a coin is a SCAM.”
“They are actively damaging the project.”
To all crypto people:
Please stop pinging me, stop harassing me.
I will never make a coin.
Any project that lists me as the owner of a coin is a SCAM.
No, I will not accept fees.
You are actively damaging the project.—Peter Steinberger 🦞 (@steipete) January 27, 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 local host trust model breaks when running behind a reverse proxy.
Separately, a researcher found 386 malicious “skills” (add-on scripts for OpenClaw agents) posted to the project’s skills repository, many of them specifically targeting cryptocurrency traders.
Steinberger has since joined OpenAI to lead its personal agent division, and OpenClaw became an independent open source foundation. The project is thriving.
But Discord’s cryptocurrency ban remains in place, scarring a week-long episode that showed how quickly token speculative culture can engulf a legitimate software project and nearly bury it.
