Think of the Gateway as OpenClaw's central nervous system. It's a WebSocket server that manages your sessions and routes messages between layers. It 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 and error recovery alongside logging. If the Gateway goes down, everything stops. Can you see why this layer is the one you monitor most carefully?