Author: Nancy, PANews

A dark horse emerges in the open source community. In just three months, OpenClaw has become the most popular and fastest-growing open source project in history, becoming a new favorite among developers.

This wave of intelligent agents initiated by Peter Steinberger not only elevated him to the top of the AI field but also garnered a large number of "lobster followers" worldwide. This hot lobster guru, however, has expressed strong rejection towards the cryptocurrency space and has publicly criticized it multiple times. This stance undoubtedly brings more negative discourse to cryptocurrency.

Reaching GitHub star mark, urgently "avoiding suspicion" regarding crypto projects

There is no doubt that AI has become the golden narrative for the collective migration of capital and talent. Its rapid rise has led many to view AI as a hope for revitalizing the crypto industry, becoming a new opportunity for many within the circle to ride the wave or seek investment.

Especially with the recent surge of OpenClaw. According to the latest data, OpenClaw's star count on GitHub has surpassed 250,000, exceeding Linux and React, becoming one of the most popular open source projects, and setting a record for the fastest growth in open source history.

As "raising lobsters" becomes a global craze, tutorials, monetization cases, and user experiences related to OpenClaw are continuously emerging, with some even profiting from installing OpenClaw on-site. From independent developers to large companies, and now to offline services, OpenClaw's "shovel seller" business is thriving exceptionally.

The crypto market naturally will not miss this hot topic. Recently, the AI project Venice on the Base chain became OpenClaw's recommended model provider, and the only crypto-native project. With the backing of top AI projects, the Venice token surged in response, with its market value temporarily surpassing 900 million dollars. This news quickly attracted the attention and shares of crypto professionals.

It is reported that Venice is a generative AI project focused on privacy protection and no content censorship, integrating various open-source large models at its core, founded in 2024 by crypto OG and ShapeShift founder Erik Voorhees, and has recently gained attention due to the Agent privacy trend.

However, Steinberger clearly does not agree with this bundled hype. He immediately clarified that, "This was an oversight in previous documents; we hope to maintain a neutral stance on this matter." Meanwhile, OpenClaw promptly removed the relevant recommendation content.

In other words, OpenClaw's "avoiding suspicion" this time is not about denying or belittling the actual value and technical advantages of the Venice project, but rather proactively removing the "official key recommendation" label that might trigger over-interpretation to avoid unnecessary narrative kidnapping and speculation about interests. Especially as the open-source Agent framework, and with the founder having joined OpenAI, OpenClaw needs to maintain technical neutrality to avoid any suspicion of conflicts of interest.

Choosing to cut ties due to crypto "shenanigans," considered abandoning the project

Unlike AI leaders like OpenAI founder Sam Altman and xAI co-founder Musk, who hold a positive or even open attitude towards crypto, Steinberger adopts a "do not disturb" stance. This attitude of avoidance inevitably causes discomfort in the crypto circle.

In fact, Steinberger, who is not interested in crypto, is very resistant to the "shenanigans" in the crypto circle. Since last year, he has issued dozens of public statements expressing strong dissatisfaction with the culture of crypto speculation, even stating "stay away from this."

Particularly after OpenClaw became popular. In January of this year, OpenClaw's popularity surged, but due to its original name Clawdbot conflicting with the trademark of Anthropic's AI model Claude, it received a cease and desist notice from a legal team. Subsequently, Steinberger made two name changes, ultimately settling on OpenClaw.

However, this renaming controversy was seized and hyped by crypto speculators.

During the renaming process, some snipers quickly hijacked accounts using automated scripts, pretending to be official and taking the opportunity to issue fake tokens like CLAWD, causing the market value of some tokens to soar to tens of millions of dollars and attracting a large number of investors.

In the face of market speculation, Steinberger quickly stated that he would never issue tokens and emphasized that any project issuing tokens in his name is a scam. This move led to a sharp drop in the price of these tokens, causing significant losses for many retail investors.

If this crypto farce only made Steinberger feel disgusted, then the disruption to the community ecosystem made him feel angry.

As OpenClaw continues to rise, a large number of crypto players flock into related communities, with some radical individuals maliciously submitting code and sending abusive private messages, demanding Steinberger claim transaction fees or make the project crypto.

In response, the official OpenClaw Discord server has begun to comprehensively prohibit the mention of keywords like Bitcoin and Crypto, even neutral technical discussions are not exempt; a user was removed for referencing Bitcoin block height for benchmarking.

"I underestimated this group of people," Steinberger frankly pointed out in a recent interview, describing the crypto community as a very unique subculture that quickly tokenizes any trending topic. However, he has already achieved financial freedom and has no desire to support such (crypto) things. The noise from crypto makes it nearly impossible for him to see any genuine project discussions; the related speculative hype is harming the project.

It is precisely because of the "harassment" from the crypto community that this genius developer admitted he even considered abandoning the whole project at one point; he does not want the project to become a tool for crypto speculation.

Recently, Steinberger publicly advised young people not to "waste time on cryptocurrency," further exposing his dissatisfaction with the crypto industry.

This unexpected clash between the open source community and the crypto space is not just a "self-protection" act of a blockbuster project but also reflects the unresolved contradiction between the purity of technology and capital speculation amid the current AI wave.

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