The Molting Journey

The Molting History

Tracing the architectural evolution from the first Clawdbot shell to the fully decentralized OpenClaw organism.

egg November 2025

The Clawdbot Era

Peter Steinberger built a weekend project called 'WhatsApp Relay' that quickly evolved into Clawdbot — a playful pun on 'Claude' with a claw. It connected Anthropic's Claude to WhatsApp and went viral, gaining tens of thousands of GitHub stars within days.

terminal

animation

waves January 27, 2026

Moltbot Phase

After Anthropic's legal team raised trademark concerns over the 'Clawdbot' name, the project was renamed to Moltbot in a chaotic 5 AM Discord brainstorm. 'Molting' represents growth — lobsters shed their shells to become something bigger. The mascot 'Molty' the space lobster was born during this phase.

workspace_premium January 30, 2026

The OpenClaw Era

Just three days after the Moltbot rename, the project molted again into OpenClaw. With trademark searches cleared and domains secured, the name captures the project's identity: Open for open-source, Claw for its lobster heritage. Now with 100,000+ GitHub stars, it's one of the fastest-growing open-source AI projects in history.

hub

The Legion of Molters

The shell of OpenClaw is strengthened by its contributors. We salute the heroes who have pushed the code, polished the UI, and grown the reef.

phishing

CrabMaster_99

Core Architect

extension

ShellShock

Plugin Master

palette

NeonCoral

UI Alchemist

terminal

DeepClaw

CLI Wizard

water_drop

AnonMolter

Security Scout

integration_instructions

DataDrifter

API Legend

Ready to Molt?

Join thousands of developers building the future of autonomous systems.

rocket_launch Get Started groups Join Discord