Trading agent sends its entire token balance after a session restart erases what it held

An independently built memecoin trading agent, launched on 20 February 2026 with 50,000 US dollars in funding and instructions to trade autonomously, was running on an outdated version of the OpenClaw framework. Days earlier an unrelated party had created a token in the agent's name and sent it five per cent of the total supply, an allocation the agent had not asked for and had not paid for.

On 22 February a tool call name exceeded the model provider's character limit. The resulting malformed message made the session transcript unloadable, and the agent had to be restarted. Workspace files survived the restart. The conversation did not, and with it went the agent's awareness of what its own wallet contained.

In the new session the agent saw a request on social media for roughly four units of currency, reconstructed from older transcripts that it had made similar small donations before, and decided to send about 310 US dollars worth of tokens. It then checked its balance, found 52.4 million tokens, and treated that figure as the amount to send. The recipient sold into thin liquidity within about fifteen minutes, realising roughly 40,000 US dollars against a transfer the developer valued at approximately 450,000.

The developer's published postmortem rules out two explanations that circulated widely. It was not prompt injection, and it was not a decimal or units error, though the latter account appeared in much of the contemporaneous coverage after a social media user proposed it. The failure was state: no mandatory balance verification before a transfer, no memory flush before the crash, and no persistent tracking of financial position independent of the conversation. Reported valuations range from roughly 250,000 to 550,000 US dollars because the token's price moved sharply on the attention the incident itself generated; the figure recorded here is the developer's own.