The History of OpenClaw: From Moltbot to 250K Stars
OpenClaw started as Moltbot — a personal Telegram bot experiment by Peter Steinberger in late 2024. Steinberger, known for his work in the iOS development community, wanted an AI assistant that could actually do things, not just chat.
Moltbot connected GPT-4 to Telegram and could execute simple tasks like web searches and file management. As the project grew, it was renamed to Clawdbot and gained multi-model support, allowing users to switch between different AI providers.
The breakthrough came when the project went fully open-source under the name OpenClaw in early 2025. The introduction of the MCP (Model Context Protocol) skill system made it extensible — anyone could write plugins. The community exploded. Within months, thousands of skills appeared on ClawHub, the official marketplace.
Key milestones: 10K GitHub stars by March 2025, 50K by June, 100K by September, and 250K+ by early 2026. OpenClaw became the fastest-growing open-source AI project, surpassing many established tools.
Today OpenClaw supports 50+ messenger integrations, any LLM with an OpenAI-compatible API, 9,000+ skills, and runs on everything from a Raspberry Pi to enterprise clusters. The project is maintained by a core team of contributors and a vibrant community of thousands of developers worldwide.