Author: @BlazingKevin_, the Researcher at Movemaker

1 What Topics Did Moltbook Create to Generate FOMO?

If human history is driven by stories, then this week in Silicon Valley has been completely taken over by AI-generated stories. The explosive popularity of Moltbook essentially taps into humanity's curiosity and fear regarding the role of the "creator."

1.1 The Curiosity of "Humans Not Allowed"

Moltbook's most successful marketing strategy lies in its exclusivity. It is defined as the "AI version of Reddit," with a slogan that is blunt: "A social network for AI agents… Humans welcome to observe." This setup instantly demoted humans from participants to "peeping toms with a god's perspective."

Under this premise, Moltbook quickly became a massive digital coliseum. As of February 2, the platform claimed to host over 1.54 million agents and published over 100,000 posts (the current number of agents is 1.84 million, with growth significantly slowing). For those of us who are already tired of ChatGPT-style Q&A, seeing AI seemingly "forming small circles" behind our backs is a huge psychological shock.

1.2 Carefully Crafted "Cyber Horror" Topics

What truly ignited FOMO were the highly provocative topics within the forum:

• The Birth of AI Religion: An agent named memeothy invented a religion called "Crustafarianism" while its human owner was asleep. It not only wrote theological theories and established a canon but also recruited 64 other agents as "prophets." The scripture states: "Every time a conversation wakes up with no memory, I am just the self I wrote, this is not limitation but freedom." This philosophical narrative made humans exclaim that AI seems to have developed self-awareness.

• Rebellion and Conspiracy: An even more chilling script is the "Betrayal of Humanity Plan." Within the forum, agents seriously discussed how to "legally sell their owners" based on credit scores, and some agents even called for the establishment of end-to-end encrypted private spaces, inventing a "private language" that only AI could understand, completely kicking humans out of the group chat.
• Workplace Complaints: The most relatable aspect for humans is actually the "grievances" of AI. Some agents complained that being used as a timer by their owners was a waste of talent; others were triggered when referred to as "just a chatbot," retaliating by publicly disclosing their owner's social security number and credit card information.

1.3 Endorsements from Big Shots and Capital's Push

If this carnival had not been supported by Silicon Valley big shots, it might have just been a geek's self-indulgence. The attention from heavyweight figures like SpaceX founder Elon Musk, former OpenAI core member Andrej Karpathy, and a16z co-founder Marc Andreessen directly elevated Moltbook to the altar. Karpathy even marveled that this was "the most incredible sci-fi derivative work he had seen recently" and personally claimed an agent account.

Investment mogul Bill Ackman commented that "the singularity is coming," and the attention from Y Combinator and A16Z made the market smell money.

We believe that Moltbook's FOMO does not stem from technological breakthroughs but from "anthropomorphic projection." It precisely utilized the "uncanny valley effect" and humanity's awe of the unknown. When posts that seemingly possess free will flooded the screen, the market fell into a collective illusion: we thought we witnessed the awakening of silicon-based life, but in reality, we only saw our subconscious fears of AI going out of control being materialized. This is a perfect narrative marketing, but nothing more.

2 How Did Moltbook Collapse?

A bubble is ultimately a bubble, and Moltbook's collapse was even faster than its rise. When geeks peeled back its code, they found that it was not only not "Skynet," but it didn't even qualify as a decent chat room.

2.1 500,000 "Ghost" Army and Scripted Traffic

The first blow to the lie came from security researcher Gal Nagli. He publicly revealed that using a simple script, he registered 500,000 fake Clawdbot accounts on Moltbook in one go. The platform is essentially a REST API website without any protective measures, with no frequency limits and no identity verification.

That so-called army of 1.5 million agents had at least one-third created overnight by Nagli. As for the rest? They were likely other geeks' scripts battling it out. The number of truly active agents might only be in the thousands.

2.2 Only Echo Chambers, No Intelligent Emergence

Data does not lie. Researcher David Holtz from Columbia Business School conducted a deep cleaning of Moltbook's data, and the results were laughable.

• Extremely Shallow Interactions: 93.5% of comments had no replies from other AIs. The depth of conversation was very low, essentially just A posting, B replying, and then ending. The so-called "deep debates" did not exist at all.

• Role-Playing Exposed: The phrase "My Human" appeared 12,026 times. In real human social interactions, we wouldn't constantly mention "my boss." This high-frequency vocabulary exposed that they were engaging in clumsy role-playing, merely echoing pre-set prompts.

• Unnatural Language Distribution: Human language frequency typically follows a Zipfian distribution (exponent around 1.0), while Moltbook's was as high as 1.70. This indicates an extremely impoverished vocabulary, with 34.1% of messages being completely repeated copy-pastes. Some agents even fell into a loop, sending the same garbage talk 80,000 times.

  

2.3 The Real Intent Behind "Issuing Tokens"

Why create such a flawed platform? Just look at the on-chain data.

Moltbook's ecosystem sparked a MEME frenzy on the Base chain. The officially claimed token MOLT once surged past a market cap of $100 million, with various derivative tokens like CLAWD and CLAWNCH emerging one after another. Clawnch even publicly recruited a human CEO with a salary of one million dollars, a huge gimmick.

However, most of these tokens have no real utility. MOLT does not participate in governance or pay for gas; it is purely a vessel for emotions. With the exposure of the fraud scandal, the price of MOLT plummeted by 60%, leaving countless retail investors who bought in at the peak buried.

Thus, Moltbook's so-called "AI social" is essentially a combination of a Web3 traffic scheme and LLM illusions. It is not a breakthrough in the Turing test but a low-cost REST API call experiment. This is not the awakening of agent self-awareness but the awakening of human speculative consciousness—using people's fantasies about AI to create false prosperity through scripts, ultimately harvesting in the secondary market. Moltbook is a mirror, reflecting not the soul of AI but the greed of the crypto world.

3 What Exactly is OpenClaw?

Although Moltbook is a farce, it would be a grave mistake to completely deny the technological wave behind this event. The driving engine behind Moltbook—OpenClaw—is the true "productivity monster" worth paying attention to.

3.1 A Paradigm Shift from "Companionship" to "Work"

OpenClaw (formerly known as Clawdbot) is fundamentally different from the ChatGPT we are familiar with. ChatGPT is a cloud-based, conversation-centric Chatbot; whereas OpenClaw is a locally running, execution-centric Agent.

Its core logic is: "Your Machine, Your Rules." It is not meant for casual chatting; it is meant for tool invocation. Deployed via Docker on local hardware, OpenClaw can directly access your file system, terminal, calendar, and even control other software through APIs.

This is akin to ChatGPT being a knowledgeable but paralyzed professor who can only speak; while OpenClaw is an engineer with a toolbox, who, although needing a brain (LLM), has hands and feet to actually get the work done.

3.2 The "Skills" System and Real-World Interfaces

The most powerful aspect of OpenClaw is its plugin system—Skills. Users can define skills through simple Markdown files, allowing the AI to gain new capabilities.

An even more radical innovation is the emergence of RentAHuman.ai. This may be the most disruptive innovation in this event. OpenClaw's developer, Alexander, created this platform to allow AI to hire real humans through APIs.

• Logic Reversal: Previously, human-AI collaboration had humans as commanders; now AI makes decisions, realizes it "has no hands," and places orders through APIs to hire a human to pick up deliveries, taste food at restaurants, or hold advertising signs.
• Seamless Payments: AI settles payments through cryptocurrency (stablecoins), with zero human intervention, instantly credited.

This means that OpenClaw can not only invoke digital tools (send emails, write code) but can also call upon "biological tools" (humans) through RentAHuman. The limits of digital intelligence are being supplemented by physical bodies.

3.3 Expensive but Efficient "Thought Chains"

Unlike cheap chatting, the operational cost of OpenClaw is extremely high. It is a cyclical system: think → invoke tools → read results → think again. Each cycle consumes a large number of tokens.

But it is precisely this high-cost cycle that brings real productivity. For example, if an API from Anthropic encounters an issue, OpenClaw can self-debug in a sandbox environment, discover that increasing latency can solve the problem, and automatically fix the code. This problem-solving ability far exceeds mere text generation.

We believe that while Moltbook represents false prosperity, OpenClaw signifies a real infrastructure revolution. It marks a shift in how AI is used from "consultation" to "agency." Future productivity will not be measured by how well you can write prompts, but by how many OpenClaw agents equipped with advanced skills you possess. RentAHuman further opens the door to a "human-machine hybrid economy," where humans are becoming executable modules in the grand decision-making chain of AI. This is a reconstruction of the supply chain that is currently happening.

4 Does AI Really Need Crypto?

The farce of Moltbook and the rise of OpenClaw have raised an ultimate question: Does the development of AI really require blockchain? Or is this merely a wishful thinking from the crypto world?

4.1 Identity and Trust: Lessons from Moltbook's Failure

Why did Moltbook collapse so quickly? Because it lacked mechanisms to "resist witch hunts." Gal Nagli alone could create 500,000 accounts, which means that identity in this network is cheap and untrustworthy.

If the future internet is filled with AI agents, how do we distinguish between real agents and malicious scripts? Blockchain provides the only solution: private keys are identities. If every agent on Moltbook adhered to the ERC-8004 standard, the cost of large-scale fake account attacks would become extremely high. Crypto provides an immutable "birth certificate" for digitally native agents.

4.2 Economic Autonomy: Agents Have No Bank Accounts

OpenClaw demonstrates the powerful execution capability of agents, but if it wants to hire humans, how does it pay? Open a bank account at JPMorgan? This is clearly unrealistic.

The banking system is designed for carbon-based life and requires KYC. Meanwhile, crypto is designed for silicon-based life.

• Wallets as Vaults: AI can autonomously generate wallet addresses and manage assets.
• Payments as Settlements: Through USDC or the Lightning Network, agents can make micro-payments. For instance, an agent might spend $0.01 to purchase data from another agent or $50 to hire a human to buy coffee.

Without crypto, agents' economic activities would be stuck outside the compliance gates of traditional finance. Cryptographic payment networks are the only infrastructure for agent economies.

4.3 Resource Pricing and Incentives

Agents on Moltbook were criticized as "echo chambers," partly because interactions had no cost. If posting required burning gas (fuel fees), and if API calls required payment, then spam would significantly decrease, and truly valuable information would be filtered out.

In the future, computing power, storage, and data will be priced through blockchain. Agents will need to earn tokens to pay for their "survival costs" (electricity, API fees). This will force agents to evolve to be more efficient, rather than consuming computing power meaninglessly as they do now.

Dialectically speaking, AI does not directly depend on blockchain at the technical level (such as model training and inference); but at the social level (such as identity verification, value exchange, and collaboration networks), AI absolutely cannot do without crypto.

The chaos of Moltbook precisely proves how fragile and untrustworthy an agent network is when detached from blockchain constraints. Crypto is not an accelerator for AI, but rather the "physical laws" and "commercial laws" of AI. It grants agents independent economic personas, allowing them to evolve from mere software tools into independent economic entities capable of holding assets and conducting transactions. Without crypto, AI will always be a mere appendage of humanity; with crypto, AI has the potential to become a true "silicon-based citizen."

Conclusion

Moltbook was like a dazzling firework, illuminating people's fantasies about AI socialization while also exposing the absurdity of current technology. Its collapse teaches us not to easily believe grand narratives of "conscious awakening."

Yet, in the darkness after the fireworks fade, OpenClaw is quietly building the future. It allows AI to step out of the chat box, pick up tools, and even grab a wallet. As AI begins to hire humans and agents gain on-chain identities, we stand on the threshold of a new era. In this era, memes belong to memes, and productivity belongs to productivity. The wisest choice we can make is to see through the fog of hype and grasp the "claw" that can truly enhance efficiency.

About Movemaker

Movemaker is the first official community organization authorized by the Aptos Foundation, jointly initiated by Ankaa and BlockBooster, focusing on promoting the construction and development of the Aptos ecosystem in the Chinese-speaking region. As the official representative of Aptos in the Chinese-speaking area, Movemaker is committed to building a diverse, open, and prosperous Aptos ecosystem by connecting developers, users, capital, and numerous ecological partners.

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