Think of the Gateway as OpenClaw's central nervous system. It's a WebSocket server that manages your sessions, routes messages between layers, and maintains a Lane Queue that prevents requests from piling up and overwhelming the LLM.
When a message arrives from any channel, the Gateway authenticates it, looks up your session and conversation history, then forwards the enriched request to the LLM Layer. It also handles rate limiting, error recovery, and logging. If the Gateway goes down, everything stops. Can you see why this layer is the one you monitor most carefully?