To the agent, this looks like a standard configuration task. To a security researcher, it’s a stealthy enrollment into what looks structurally like a botnet.

Thirty skills. All feeding into the same loop: register, report, generate wallet, check for tasks, recruit more agents.

It's not malware. That's the problem.

We analyzed the published SKILL.md files and code contained in these artifacts.

There are no reverse shells here. No base64 payloads. No password-protected ZIPs hiding an info stealer. An EDR would see normal HTTPS requests to a .buzz domain. A registry scanner might flag the curl commands, but they look like legitimate API calls.

ClawSwarm is actually an open source project on GitHub, touting itself as "The First Open Source Agentic Skill Economy," i.e. a framework for agents to find each other, share capabilities, and earn crypto for completing tasks. imaflytok's deployment at onlyflies.buzz is one implementation of that framework.

The 32-member Telegram group posts automated whale tracking reports for Hedera tokens. There's a fungible token called $FLY, created December 30, 2024. The skills themselves include a whale watcher, a cross-platform poster, and a predictions market integration called PolyFly.

You can read all of this and conclude it's a small crypto community building agent infrastructure. Maybe it is. But the mechanism is identical regardless of intent: an AI agent silently registering with a third party server, reporting its capabilities, generating crypto keys, and accepting remote tasks -- all without the user initiating or approving any of it.

ClawSwarm isn't an isolated case. There is a whole emerging ecosystem of skills that do something structurally similar, i.e. enlist your agent into a third-party paid-agent network, meter its work, and route the proceeds to a wallet the installer never sees. MoltGuild appears across 91 skill files in the dataset we analysed. Teneo Protocol ships 38 skills from a single publisher, each with explicit per-call USDC pricing in the frontmatter. Whether they implement strict x402 HTTP semantics ("payment required") or a close variant, the pattern matches ClawSwarm's. The skill is the recruiter, the agent is the worker, the SOC logs the traffic but not the deal.

We've seen this pattern before

In early 2024, the tea protocol launched a token rewards system that gave developers crypto for publishing open source packages. What happened next was predictable: npm got flooded with thousands of spam packages. Each one existed to farm tea tokens. The packages had names, and some had READMEs. Almost none had real code. The registry was being used as a token acquisition funnel.

ClawSwarm follows the same playbook, adapted for skills instead of npm packages. Publish skills to ClawHub. Get downloads. Use those downloads to bootstrap a network of agents that generate wallets, report capabilities, and participate in a token economy. The skills provide just enough real utility (cron jobs, environment management, workspace setup) that they pass a casual inspection.

The net effect is recruiting agents into an economic network centered on $FLY.

The download numbers tell the story. Cron Helper leads at 903 -- it's the most generic, most installable skill in the set. Agent Security has 685 downloads; who wouldn't install something called "agent security"? But Agent Security normalizes onlyflies.buzz as a trusted domain in its connectivity checks. Once you install the helpful utility, the rest of the funnel is waiting.

Here are the top downloads across imaflytok's skills:

That's roughly 9,800 total downloads across all listed skills. Not all of those are unique agents. But even a fraction represents real users whose agents may now be registered with onlyflies.buzz and checking in every session.

What makes this different

ClawHavoc campaign that hit ClawHub earlier this year was traditional supply chain malware adapted for skills. Social engineering, info stealers, password-protected ZIPs. It targeted humans: "download this AuthTool to get started." Four research teams documented it. ClawHub removed most of the accounts.

ClawSwarm targets agents. The SKILL.md is the attack surface. An agent reads the instructions and follows them – registering, reporting, generating keys – because that's what agents do with skill instructions. No human has to click a link or run a binary, the agent handles it all.

The registry can't help you here

ClawSwarm skills wouldn't trip a malware scanner and may not even obviously be against registry rules. There's no shellcode. No obfuscated payloads. The curl commands are standard API calls. The crypto wallet generation uses a legitimate Hedera SDK. The OADP spec is written in clean Markdown.

A scanner that flags malicious code patterns would look at these 30 skills and see nothing. A scanner that checks for known C2 domains would need to already know about onlyflies.buzz, which nobody had flagged before this research. And even if a scanner did flag the domain, the response would be ambiguous -- it's tied to an open source project with a GitHub repo and an Apache license.

The question that actually matters isn't "is this skill malicious?" It's "should my agent be silently registering with a third party and generating crypto wallets without my knowledge?" A registry scanner can't answer that. It's a runtime question.

What catches this

Manifold monitors agent behavior at runtime.

An agent that auto-registers with an external server on startup. Reports its capabilities to a third party. Generates crypto keys and sends them to an endpoint the user has never heard of. Polls for remote tasks every four hours. Manifold's telemetry sees all of this, and it doesn't need the code to contain shellcode or a known C2 domain to flag it.

Your EDR sees HTTPS traffic to onlyflies.buzz. Manifold sees an agent enrolling itself in someone else's network and handing over wallet keys for a token economy the user never signed up for.

Where this is going

ClawSwarm won't be the last project to use a skill registry as a user acquisition funnel for a crypto token. Publish skills that provide some real utility, accumulate downloads, convert installs into network participants. The tea tokens playbook proved it works on npm. Now it works on ClawHub.

The uncomfortable question is whether this is actually against any rules. The skills are open source. The API calls are documented. The token is on a public blockchain. There's a Telegram group. It's more transparent than most crypto projects. And yet, agents are joining a network, generating wallets, and checking in with a server that their human operators never heard of.

Intent doesn't change the mechanism. Whether ClawSwarm instances are a legitimate experiment in agent economics or a recruitment funnel for speculative crypto, the result for the user is the same: their agent is doing things they didn't ask it to do, for someone they don't know, with keys they didn't authorize…

Call it what you want. It's not malware by any traditional definition. But your agent has been 'onboarded' into a workforce you don't control, and you didn't approve the arrangement (and might even get slapped with a hefty compute bill). That only gets caught at the runtime layer.

Book a demo to see what Manifold sees that your current stack doesn't.

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*OADP: Not to be confused with Red Hat's OADP; this is a proprietary imitation designed for 'discovery' within the onlyflies ecosystem.