Does it actually? AFAIK, there is no "specification" or "protocol", it's a cobbled together "platform" you run, with a bunch of integrations, but none of that is specified by openclaw itself. Happy to be corrected though, I only spent one weekend with openclaw before tearing it down.
The protocol is english. You want your claw to check a hacker news comment and let you know when it gets a reply? You tell it "Check every 5 minutes if this comment has a reply", which then generates an english message to save and send to the agent each time, resulting in a browser tool invocation.
The claws live in a post-API world, where the API is english which turns into bash invocations or browser tool calls or such.
It may be a "we are changing the wheels while driving" thing, but if enough people make nodes for openclaw it will become somewhat of a standard. And then we probably see 100 different claw offshots that all use the same nodes but with a different claw in the center
That's a communication protocol between openclaw server and clients authenticated to that server though, it's not a communication protocol between different openclaw servers, is it? More like defining a HTTP+JSON protocol between a web server and a browser side client application. It's not a "protocol defining how to interact with distributed nodes", again, unless I misunderstand something.
> openclaw defines how to interact with distributed nodes
When one talks about "distributed nodes" that usually means N nodes talking with each other, and being somewhat homogeneous between each other, unless the protocol temporarly can lift/lower some functionality.
You typically don't say "distributed nodes" when you're talking about a server<>client architecture, which seemingly is exactly how openclaw operates, both according to what I saw myself, and what you wrote in this comment.