AI agent token once worth $2.4 billion ends with founder calling it dead

Nineteen months after AI16Z reached a $2.4 billion market cap, the founder of the project behind it has declared its successor token, ELIZAOS, dead and told holders to sell.

Shaw Walters, founder of Eliza Labs and the open-source ElizaOS agent framework, said the ELIZAOS token is finished and its foundation is closing.

“The token is dead. Completely,” Walters wrote on X earlier Wednesday. He said there would be no further foundation support, buybacks or supply measures, and that he plans to continue building the software without launching another token.

ELIZAOS trades near $0.00031 with a market cap of about $2.3 million, down 97% from its high. AI16Z, the token it replaced through a migration, peaked at $2.39 billion 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 US hours.

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.

The firm filed a proposed class action in the Southern District of New York in April, alleging false advertising, deceptive practices, negligent misrepresentation and unjust enrichment. The complaint claimed the project marketed itself as an “autonomous, AI-run venture fund” even though Walters and other insiders controlled it. It also alleged that holders were diluted during the migration from AI16Z to ELIZAOS.

The rebrand followed objections from venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, commonly known as a16z, over the original name.

“Their claim was ridiculous, but we didn’t have the capital to legally fight it,” Walters wrote. He added that he once held tokens worth about $25 million in his wallet and watched their value fall toward zero.

CoinDesk has asked Eliza Labs and Burwick Law about the settlement terms, the status of the federal case and what holders received when the original daos.fun vehicle expired.

AI16Z launched on Solana in October 2024 with a pitch built around an AI agent running a venture-style fund and token holders participating as partners. By late December, its daos.fun vehicle held more than $22 million in user-supplied tokens and was due to expire in October 2025.

The category began with Truth Terminal, an account run by New Zealand researcher Andy Ayrey that posted its own strange, quasi-religious material on X, and drew a $50,000 bitcoin donation from a16z founder Marc Andreessen in July 2024. A developer with no connection to it launched GOAT around its obsessions that October, and the token hit $1.2 billion within days.

What followed was a category built on the idea that a piece of software could hold its own wallet, post its own opinions and have a token priced against whatever it did next. Base network-based Virtuals Protocol let anyone deploy one in an afternoon. The Solana-focused AI16Z went further, proposing that the agent make the investment decisions.

Reply bots then filled Crypto Twitter, occasionally launching tokens at each other, and by early 2025 the sector was worth several billion dollars, with AI16Z and Virtuals accounting for more than half of it.