弄潮先溺，「加密xAI」先驱ai16z的落幕

Original Author: David, Deep Tide TechFlow

ai16z, do you still remember that name?

If you do, it means you lived through the crypto AI coin craze at the end of 2024. If you don't, that's also normal — the AI Agent token category has been quiet for a long time now.

Crypto x AI, in this current era where AI tools are gradually being adopted and advancing at breakneck speed, looks more like a pseudo-concept and an outdated toy.

Today, Shaw Walters, the founder of the Eliza OS project, published a very, very long article. The gist of it is that the ai16z token is completely dead, the foundation has been shut down, there will be no buybacks, and token holders are left to deal with it on their own.

He suggests you either sell it, or "get a bunch of people to pump it," but don't expect him to do anything more.

The tone of this letter isn't that of a founder gracefully announcing the end of a project. It sounds more like someone who, after cursing everyone out, slams the door in disappointment. He called the crypto community "a bunch of spoiled crybabies" and said a law firm sued him on behalf of token holders.

The Eliza OS foundation, lacking funds to fight the lawsuit, paid out all its remaining money.

Shaw also said his wallet once held $25 million worth of ai16z tokens. He never sold a single one, and watched it go to zero. Now he lives off his savings, in a shabby little bedroom in San Francisco, writing code every day.

From his perspective, perhaps he sees himself as someone who tried to build with idealism in a chaotic market, only to be left with ruin, disappointment, and anger.

This author has no intention of judging these personal emotions. But standing at the crossroads of shifting narratives, a re-centering of industry priorities, and the rise of AI, the shutdown of Eliza OS inevitably evokes a sense that Crypto x AI truly got up early but arrived late to the party.

A Step Ahead, Riding the Wave

In October 2024, ai16z launched its crowdfunding on DAOs.fun, aiming to raise 420.69 SOL, approximately $75,000, to create an investment fund autonomously managed by AI.

420.69 — anyone familiar with crypto culture knows this is a meme number. From the very choice of the fundraising amount, the underlying tone of this project was already set.

But it truly took off. In less than three months, ai16z's market cap surged to $2.6 billion. It also spawned an entire category — GOAT leading the way, VIRTUAL following behind, with a never-ending stream of Agent-themed tokens emerging. The entire AI Agent track grew from zero to nearly $10 billion.

Conceptually, crypto was indeed a step ahead. What was the state of the AI market at the end of 2024?

ChatGPT had just turned two and was often criticized for its hallucinations; Claude didn't yet have tools to directly operate computers. Most people's understanding of "AI Agent" was still at the conceptual level. Yet the crypto market had already put a price tag on the concept.

But there was one detail that few people paid attention to at the time.

Less than a week after ai16z launched, some crypto media outlets published reports questioning whether the core AI Agent of the ai16z project — the so-called "Marc AIndreessen" that was supposed to autonomously make investment decisions — was actually operated by humans behind the scenes, rather than an actual Agent thinking for itself.

This same skepticism later extended to the well-known crypto market analysis Agent, aiIxbt.

At the time, such doubts were unlikely to cause any ripples or FUD. The market cap kept rising, the community kept cheering, and new AI Agent tokens kept launching... Looking back, this might be the most precise microcosm of the entire crypto AI narrative.

Truth or fiction didn't matter. In an environment of overflowing liquidity, a slightly ahead-of-its-time narrative was enough to spark a wave of speculation.

The concept was sound, the direction was right, but the token existed before the product, and the price existed before the technology. That, in essence, is the spirit of crypto being a step ahead.

The Future Has Arrived, But It Passes Crypto By

In 2026, AI Agents have truly arrived.

In the West, there's CodeX and Claude. In the East, there are competitors like Workbuddy that are better suited to local conditions. Looking back at the narratives that lived only in whitepapers during the crypto AI hype cycle — like automatically analyzing market conditions, handling workflows, or monitoring sentiment — these have all become reality by now.

This might be one of the few narratives in the crypto industry, besides stablecoins, that has actually found real-world traction.

But the ones delivering on these promises are a completely different group. It's Anthropic, it's OpenAI, it's the teams writing code in San Francisco and Hangzhou. The money flows to aggregation platforms like OpenRouter, to cloud providers' GPU bills, and to every API call that genuinely runs.

Another line from Shaw's long post evokes deep reflection:

"Over in AI, they don't have these problems. The people there are optimistic, they're empowered, they're building the future instead of tearing each other down. Those are my people." A person who once ignited the crypto AI Agent narrative concludes that this industry is fundamentally incompatible with AI?

Objectively speaking, the currently successful AI applications and large models indeed have no reason to issue tokens.

Anthropic charges through subscriptions and API calls. OpenRouter runs a relay business generating over a hundred million in annual revenue. These companies never issued tokens, never set up DAOs, yet their business models work. Developers vote with their feet, and the bills they pay are the best consensus mechanism.

In contrast, the situation for crypto AI projects is brutal. When the token price holds up, everything seems fine — the treasury has money, the community has people, and the narrative has heat. But once the price collapses, everything disappears simultaneously.

Developers leave because the purchasing power of token-based salaries has shrunk by 90%. The community turns into a complaint group. People who wanted to do serious work eventually find that the project can't even budget for hiring a single engineer.

And ironically, the Eliza framework itself hasn't died. The code is still being updated, and companies are discussing partnerships on top of it. An open-source AI framework can survive without a token — whether through selling services or getting acquired, its path is far broader than a token's.

What's even more striking is this: Eliza, an open-source AI framework born out of crypto, has had Claude as its most active contributor in the past week.

An AI developer and project not tied to a token might be worth more in the 2026 market than one tied to a token.

Embracing Change

As a crypto practitioner, watching once-hot projects fall one by one inevitably stirs some melancholy.

But sentimentality doesn't mean total pessimism.

The crypto AI narrative has indeed shattered. But what shattered is the path of "issuing tokens for AI concepts." The possibilities between crypto and AI haven't been completely severed.

The few projects still alive are doing things completely different from ai16z. For instance, Bittensor is building a decentralized AI compute marketplace, and Render is working on a distributed GPU rendering network.

Both use tokens to coordinate real computational resources. They still have a market, though it's just that without a bull market, there's less premium and persuasiveness.

Additionally, in areas like on-chain data analysis, vulnerability scanning, whale wallet tracking, sentiment monitoring, and DEX contract strategies, AI is gradually coming into place and making an impact.

In 2026, a professional crypto trader opening Hyperliquid will likely already have a Claude or GPT-powered strategy window open alongside it. This means the relationship between crypto and AI isn't over — it just needs to be reversed in direction.

"AI empowers all scenarios" has become a kind of political correctness, and crypto can be covered by that umbrella too. As for how big the crypto market can still get — that might just depend on when BTC decides to recover.

On a personal level, the better move is to embrace change. A developer who has shed the baggage of a token is worth far more in today's AI world than what a token could ever offer. And a crypto player who genuinely embraces AI can capture far greater returns than the old wild-west model ever allowed.

Being in crypto often means seeing the direction a step ahead — or perhaps we just got our positioning wrong.