🤖 From $2.4B AI darling to $2.3M obituary: Eliza founder tells holders "the token is dead.

The founder of Eliza Labs has declared the ELIZAOS token finished and said its foundation is winding down, urging holders to sell while vowing to keep building the underlying software without launching another token. Shaw Walters posted on X that "The token is dead. Completely," adding there will be no further foundation support, buybacks or supply measures and that he plans to continue developing the open-source ElizaOS agent framework. "I am starting over, since I own the IP, and I am never letting a token come close to Eliza again," Walters wrote.

ELIZAOS trades near $0.00031 with a market cap of about $2.3 million, down roughly 97% from its high. The token replaced AI16Z through a migration; AI16Z peaked at a $2.39 billion market cap on Jan. 2, 2025, when daily volume reached $291 million. CoinGecko still lists the abandoned AI16Z contract separately, with a market cap of roughly $375,000 as of early U.S. hours. The project originally launched on Solana in October 2024 as ai16z and was pitched as an AI-run decentralized autonomous organization using the open-source Eliza framework to automate venture capital decisions.

Walters pinned the shutdown on litigation. He said the foundation transferred its remaining treasury and available funds to settle with a group of holders represented by Burwick Law. "Their claim was ridiculous, but we didn't have the capital to legally fight it so we settled on giving them the rest of what we had," he wrote. The group filed a proposed class action in April in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, alleging false advertising, deceptive business practices, negligent misrepresentation and unjust enrichment.

The complaint alleges Walters and Eliza Labs marketed ai16z as the governance token for an autonomous AI-managed venture fund modeled on Andreessen Horowitz when the project was actually controlled by insiders. It also alleges the project improperly used the venture firm's branding, forcing a rebrand to ElizaOS, and later expanded the token supply from 1.1 billion to 11 billion during a migration that diluted existing holders. AI16Z rebranded to ElizaOS after Andreessen Horowitz objected to its use of the ai16z name.

Walters also denied personally profiting from the project, saying he earned only a modest salary comparable to the company's other engineers, and wrote that he does not own any tokens. "I don't own any tokens. I don't support any of it," he wrote. "I love the technology and I'll come back one day when the culture has grown past this point." He closed his post with the line, "Eliza is dead. Long live Eliza," and said development of the ElizaOS framework will continue.