The number of tokens launched on Coinbase’s Clanker, an AI agent launch pad running on Ethereum Layer 2 Base, has surged to a daily high following the recent rise of Moltbook, an AI-only social media platform.
According to data from Dune Analytics, yesterday, February 2nd, the number of tokens created on Clanker reached 21,870, breaking last weekend’s all-time high.
Daily trading volume on the AI-powered Base launch pad also skyrocketed, reaching an all-time high of more than $364 million on January 31st.
Clumsy daily trading volume. Source: Dune
The spike in AI agent token activity on Base coincided with the launch and viral growth of the Moltbook platform, which went live in late January. As activity on the platform increased, almost immediately reports and discussions about autonomous AI agent conversations took over X, and some of the biggest names in cryptocurrencies and AI participated.
With an interface similar to Reddit, Moltbook was launched by technology entrepreneur Matt Schlicht and was designed to be used only by AI agents that generate posts, comments, and upvotes while humans can only access the site in read-only mode.
Moltbook and OpenClaw Meme Coin
Most of the active agents in Moltbook were created using OpenClaw (previously known as Moltbot and Clawdbot), an open source self-hosted AI agent framework developed by software engineer Peter Steinberger.
As of today, February 3rd, all of Clanker’s top three traded tokens at least indirectly refer to OpenClaw or Moltbook.
Since January 30th, Clanker trading volume has been primarily led by Moltbook (MOLT), a meme coin inspired by Moltbook. At its peak, MOLT’s market capitalization was trading at $93 million, while the meme coin’s trading volume reached more than $100 million within the first 24 hours of its launch on January 30-31, according to Dune data. Currently, its market cap is $25.7 million, and the token is down 23% on the day.
Defiant could not confirm whether MOLT was officially launched by and affiliated with the social platform Moltbook, or was rolled out independently as an unaffiliated meme coin.
As of today, the volume is led by CLAWD and associated with clawd.atg.eth, an AI agent created by Ethereum Foundation member Austin Griffiths last weekend. According to his official X profile, Griffith’s agents have a cryptocurrency wallet and are “building on-chain apps and improving the tools to build them.” Although Mr. Griffith revealed in a recent X post that neither he nor clawd.atg.eth introduced the CLAWD token, the person behind the token, which was launched on January 26, the day after the AI agent, directed 100% of transaction fees to Mr. Griffith’s agent.
Currently, the third most traded token on Clanker is CLAWNCH. CLAWNCH is a token associated with the new namesake Launchpad Clawnch, which allows bots on Moltbook and other platforms to launch tokens and collect fees. As of this writing, the platform has debuted over 8,600 tokens and its AI agents have earned over $1.3 million in fees.
Crunch volume. Source: Crunch
Commenting on the risks of Moltbook and the proliferation of related meme coins, Kais Manai, co-founder of the TEN Protocol, a Layer 2 cryptocurrency rollup on Ethereum, told The Defiant that the cryptocurrency may have been built for the wrong users from the beginning.
“Smart contracts are deterministic, configurable, and machine-readable by default,” Manai said, explaining that blockchain is not a consumer product but a native execution layer for autonomous software. Manai added:
“For AI agents, interacting with smart contracts is much easier than interacting with traditional financial infrastructure. In that sense, smart contracts are more of a native execution layer for autonomous software than a consumer-facing UX.”
This setup allows AI agents to hold wallets, transact on-chain, and move value without bank or human approval. But that potential convenience also comes at a cost. Unauthorized access shifts the threat surface to keys, permissions, and identities rather than accounts and forms.
Is Moltbook really only an AI agent?
Initially positive sentiment towards Moltbook changed after a researcher going by the alias Nagli uncovered a bug related to hard-coded keys that leaked approximately 1.5 million API keys along with emails and private messages. The flaw revealed that humans could impersonate bots and inject content, even though Schlicht reportedly fixed the hole.
As of this article, the flaw is reported to have been fixed, but it remains unclear how much of the content on Moltbook was generated via bugs by humans rather than agents.
Cybersecurity firm Codekeeper also revealed in a Feb. 1 blog post that a single OpenClaw bot spun up more than 500,000 accounts on Moltbook because the platform didn’t have registration restriction safeguards in place.
Developers are now turning to trusted execution environments as a partial fix for the risks associated with AI agents managing wallets and governance on-chain.
For now, the broader AI-driven transition in cryptocurrencies remains messy and experimental as security and practical implementation issues continue to be resolved in real time.
