The token that once carried a $2.5 billion market capitalization is now worth about $305,000, and Walters says he owns none of it.
Eliza Labs founder Shaw Walters said the ai16z token is “dead. Completely.” and that the foundation behind it is winding down, after his side settled a class action brought by Burwick Law by handing over “the rest of the treasury and all the money we had.”
“Burwick sued us and we settled with a group of holders for the rest of the treasury and all the money we had,” Walters wrote on X on Tuesday evening. “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.”
Walters told remaining holders that nothing is left to support the price. “If you have some, you should either sell or get a cabal to crime it up, but there’s no foundation and no supply coming to save you, there’s no money for buybacks, it’s completely ngmi,” he wrote. He said he no longer owns any of the token, that Eliza Labs will keep building the ElizaOS software, and that he is “starting over, since I own the IP, and I am never letting a token come close to Eliza again.”
ai16z traded at about $0.000277 on Wednesday, according to CoinGecko, for a market capitalization near $305,000 and 24-hour volume of roughly $4,080. That is about 99.99% below the token’s all-time high of $2.47, set on Jan. 1, 2025, when the AI agent project was one of the loudest trades on Solana. ELIZAOS, the token ai16z holders migrated into, changed hands at about $0.000354, down 6.5% on the day, for a circulating market value of about $2.65 million across 7.48 billion tokens out of an 11 billion maximum supply.
Burwick Law filed the complaint on April 16, 2026 in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, captioned Doe v. Walters, on behalf of buyers of ai16z on Solana from Oct. 24, 2024.
The firm says the case names nine defendants, including Walters, Eliza Labs, the AI16Z DAO and token launch platform DAOs.fun, and asserts claims for deceptive acts and false advertising under New York General Business Law sections 349 and 350, plus negligent misrepresentation and unjust enrichment. It seeks damages, disgorgement and a constructive trust over traceable treasury and wallet assets.
According to the firm, the complaint alleges that “Marc AIndreessen,” the AI agent presented as running the project’s venture fund, was a facade and that humans made the investment decisions. It also alleges that a September 2025 migration expanded total supply from 1.1 billion to 11 billion tokens, giving existing holders six new tokens for each old one while routing 40% of the newly created supply — about 4.4 billion tokens — to defendant-controlled entities. Burwick Law says onchain data reflects losses across at least 3,945 wallet addresses, and that ai16z peaked near $2.5 billion in market capitalization on Jan. 2, 2025.
Walters rejected the characterization of the project as a scam. He said he never sold his holdings, drew “a modest salary” comparable to other engineers on the team, and once held $25 million in his wallet: “I coulda dumped on all of you.”
Eliza Labs sued Elon Musk’s X last year, alleging the platform cut off its API access after declining a partnership.
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