ElizaOS Founder Shaw Walters on Closing the Foundation, the Burwick Lawsuit, and Why Crypto Is Failing Builders | Markets Outlook

**Shaw Walters** (0:00)
I'm a builder, I like to build AI. I don't care about people getting rich or poor in this little gambling casino thing. I think it's kind of stupid. I think that we are in a world where there's the potential risk of massive class disparity as a result of AI.
And I think that we have a big opportunity and a need to make a serious impact there.

**Jennifer Sanasie** (0:26)
Shaw Walters, welcome to Markets Outlook.

**Shaw Walters** (0:28)
Hey, thanks for having me.

**Jennifer Sanasie** (0:30)
Thanks for being here and thanks for being willing to talk through this with us. I think we got to start with the message that you sent to token holders of ElizaOS, which was, sell the tokens, the project is dead.
Talk to me about this message. I mean, what is your message to token holders? What is your message to people on social media who feel like they've been rug pulled?

**Shaw Walters** (0:58)
Oh, I hope people don't feel that way. But if they do, maybe they deserve it.
Let's start. Where should we start? Let's see. I've been building Eliza for two and a half years, long before there was a token, and I will continue to build Eliza. The thesis was always, this is a meme coin experiment, and I'm going to continue to build the underlying project. Now, we really thought that attention was the entirety of the equation. People were really indexing heavily on attention, but I think it's not. I think that you have to have attention, but you also have to have value accrual. And we never really had value accrual. We never stated we would, we tried many things for value accrual, and most of those things were wrong. And what I reverted to was, I should just work on building what I know how to do, which is build agents. So a lot of people commented, and it was generally positive. I think that the story that I'm abandoning the token is like, I abandoned the token a long time ago. I haven't had any for a while. I had to sell it to pay my taxes. I had 1% of the token. It was worth $25 million, and I held it all the way down to like $40K, and then I was out of money. So if anyone round tripped anything, I think I've got the best position there. I'm pretty much number one on that.
Why are we starting with token holders at all? Why are you asking me this question, actually? The question is, why do people think I owe them anything?
It's a meme coin. I went to raise $75,000 with this idea of Ai16Z as a solo dev on code that I had already written and was showing people that was open source.
And so I reject this frame entirely. Like, come on, they knew what they were getting into. You knew it was a meme coin. They all knew. It was a meme coin. We said it. It was on a platform. Now, I thought certain things would happen. Like, I thought DAO's Fund would add boating and add community participation, would allow us to change the name so we didn't have to do, like, this extremely painful and value-destroying migration. I also thought they wouldn't sell an insider trade against us, but, you know, they did.
I didn't think that they would completely take away the treasury and pivot their project and then abandon it mid us making them millions of dollars, but they did.
I definitely got left holding the bag on a lot of this stuff. So I'm a builder. I like to build AI. I don't care about people getting rich or poor in this, like, little gambling casino thing. I think it's kind of stupid. I think that we are in a world where there's the potential risk of massive class disparity as a result of AI. And I think that we have a big opportunity and like a need to make a serious impact there. And what crypto has devolved into, like I got into it because I truly believe in the technology. I believe in tokens like Ethereum and like platforms. And I believe that like this stuff is great. I believe in Solana. I believe in the team behind that. But what it has engendered is a casino of zero-sum games where people are mad when they lose money so they complain and they create a toxic culture that's basically impossible to build anything real. And like if you look at someone like Peter Steinberger, creator of OpenClaw, he thinks this is all horrible. He doesn't want anything to do with it. And why doesn't one of the greatest builders of our age want anything to do with crypto? And it's because at best, it's people shilling him tokens and trying to take his dream and turn it into money to get rich off and making a token for him so he can claim the fees bro. But obviously, they're just socially scamming him and we all know that. He knows that. And then on the flip side, at worst, if he does take the fees and adopt the project, they'll start attacking him and saying he's not doing enough for it. So it's just never enough for the mob. And the mob mentality is encouraged, promoted, allowed, and there's entire groups of influencers who make money just complaining like a scooter or somebody like that whose entire thing is just to complain that he lost money. And I don't know why people allow this. I think they're addicted to the dopamine loop of hatred on the internet. But it's embarrassing. It's embarrassing to be part of even if it's not directed at you. I can't believe anybody in crypto allows, why are you asking me this question? Why are you enabling the mob, honestly, Jen? Like, come on, you know it's trash. You know that they are trash.