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Hassan Shittu
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The founder of the open-source AI assistant ClawdBot, now renamed Moltbot, has issued a public warning to the crypto community after scammers launched fake tokens using his project’s name, drawing in traders and triggering sharp losses.
Peter Steinberger said he has never issued a token, has no plans to do so, and has no connection to any cryptocurrency claiming affiliation with his work.
The fake token, $CLAWD, briefly gained traction among retail traders on Solana-based meme coin platforms, reaching an early market capitalization of around $16 million.
Momentum was short-lived; as soon as Steinberger publicly denied involvement, the market cap plunged from roughly $8 million to under $800,000.
Steinberger made the statement after days of being contacted by crypto traders and promoters following the sudden appearance of meme coins branded around “ClawdBot.”
Founder Says Token Activity Is Hurting Software Project
In a post on X, he asked investors to stop contacting him and also stated that he would not take any fees or endorsements related to crypto launches.
This caution was issued due to the emergence of the impersonation accounts that were marketing a token called $CLAWD, which was displayed on Solana-based meme coin platforms.
The token briefly gained traction among retail traders, with some reporting early gains as hype spread across social media.
Traders posted on X that the incident was another instance of speculative AI-related tokens falling as soon as official dismissal was announced.
Several users accused the anonymous token deployers of serial rug-pull behavior, claiming similar projects had been launched and abandoned under different names.
The situation was compounded by a naming transition underway at the time. Steinberger said the ClawdBot project was forced to rebrand to Moltbot following trademark issues.
During the renaming process, mistakes with account migrations allowed third parties to squat on or take control of related GitHub and X handles.
Those accounts were then used to impersonate the project and promote crypto tokens as if they were officially linked.
Steinberger said he is working with GitHub to recover the affected accounts and urged users to ignore any crypto-related claims tied to the project.
ClawdBot, now Moltbot, gained attention earlier this month after going viral among developers.
The tool is an open-source, self-hosted AI assistant designed to run locally on a user’s machine and integrate with messaging platforms such as Telegram, WhatsApp, Discord, and Slack.
Unlike web-based chatbots, it is designed to retain long-term memory, execute commands, and automate tasks directly on the user’s system.
Steinberger, who previously sold software company PSPDFKit for about €100 million, returned to development to build the project as a privacy-focused alternative to cloud-hosted AI tools.
At the same time, cybersecurity researchers have raised concerns about unsafe deployments of ClawdBot by users unfamiliar with server security.
Blockchain security firm SlowMist and independent researchers reported that hundreds of ClawdBot gateway instances were exposed to the public internet due to misconfigured proxies.
These setups potentially allowed access to API keys, chat logs, and command execution capabilities.
Researchers stressed that the issue stemmed from user configuration errors rather than a hidden exploit but warned that the risks were serious given the tool’s deep system access.
Those security warnings added to confusion as scammers used the project’s sudden visibility to market tokens to speculative traders.
https://cryptonews.com/news/clawdbot-founder-denies-token-scam-github-hijack/
