The founder of Eliza has declared the token "dead," and the foundation will be dissolved as part of a legal settlement

In a post on X, Eliza Labs founder Shaw Walter announced that the project's native token had "completely died" and officially confirmed that the liquidation process for the Eliza Foundation is underway. The main reason for this is that the remaining funds and cash holdings of the foundation were completely depleted during the process of settling the class-action lawsuit represented by Burwick Law. The project, launched in October 2024 on the Solana network under the name "ai16z," was introduced as a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) that utilizes an open-source Eliza framework to automate venture capital investment decision-making. By January 2025, it had become one of the most prominent projects in the cryptocurrency AI agent sector, with a market capitalization of approximately $2.5 billion. However, the actual venture firm, Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), subsequently objected to the use of the name, leading to a rebranding as ElizaOS. In April 2025, Burwick Law filed a class-action lawsuit against Eliza Labs in the Southern District of New York. The complaint included charges of false advertising, deceptive business practices, negligent misrepresentation, and unjust enrichment. Specifically, the core issues raised were that the project was marketed as a governance token for an autonomous AI-driven venture fund modeled after a16z, but in reality, insiders controlled the project, and that a migration was executed to increase the token supply from 1.1 billion to 11 billion, diluting the holdings of existing token holders. Walter stated that he considered the lawsuit claims to be absurd, but that he decided to settle the case by paying a settlement amount with the remaining assets because he lacked the funds to continue the legal battle