ElizaOS

elizaOS is an open-source TypeScript codebase for building autonomous AI agents that hold conversations, remember context, connect to outside tools and act on a user's behalf, including reading and writing blockchain data on Solana and EVM chains. It started life in late 2024 as the software behind ai16z, a Solana-launched AI investment DAO, and became one of the most widely used agent toolkits in crypto. The project's token and foundation were wound down in August 2026 after a class-action settlement, but its founder has said development of the open-source software continues, and the main GitHub repository remains active.

What elizaOS does

The elizaOS GitHub repository describes the project as an "open-source TypeScript framework and product stack for autonomous AI agents." It is a monorepo that bundles the core agent runtime, a command-line tool, applications, optional cloud services and a large plugin library under the MIT license. At the time of writing the main eliza repository had more than 19,000 GitHub stars and 5,700 forks.

A developer defines an agent through a character configuration, which sets its personality, knowledge and behaviour, and then attaches plugins that give it capabilities. The elizaOS documentation lists more than 90 plugins, covering chat platforms such as Discord, Telegram and X, model providers such as OpenAI, and blockchains including Ethereum and Solana. The docs pitch setup as three commands: install the CLI, create a project and start the agent. Agents can run locally, in Docker, on custom infrastructure or on Eliza Cloud, a hosted option.

How it works

The team's research paper, Eliza: A Web3 friendly AI Agent Operating System, published on arXiv in January 2025 with Shaw Walters as lead author, sets out the architecture. A large language model acts as the agent's reasoning core, and the runtime surrounds it with a small set of building blocks:

• Clients connect an agent to outside platforms such as chat apps and social networks.
• Providers feed context into the model, such as wallet balances, market data or retrieved documents.
• Actions are the things an agent can do, from posting a message to signing a transaction.
• Evaluators review conversations and outcomes after the fact to extract facts and judge decisions.
• Plugins package these pieces so new capabilities, such as retrieval-augmented generation or image and video generation, can be added without changing the core.

The paper's central claim is that blockchain access is native to the design: agents can read on-chain data, interact with smart contracts and manage wallets while the whole system stays a TypeScript application under the user's control.

The current README adds a broader personal-assistant scope. It lists chat, voice, memory and knowledge workflows; calendar, reminders and goal tracking; browser and desktop automation; device bridges for camera, contacts and location; scheduled workflows and coding-agent orchestration; and non-custodial wallet operations for EVM chains and Solana. The code is model-agnostic. It supports local inference through Eliza-1, a set of models based on Gemma 4 ranging from 2B to 27B parameters, as well as direct connections to hosted model providers or routing through Eliza Cloud, which also handles accounts, authentication and agent deployment.

Related products

The elizaos.ai domain now redirects to Eliza Research, which describes itself as "a small team building in the open." It presents Eliza as "your personal agent and an open source operating system" that "remembers, schedules, connects to your tools, and acts on your behalf across every device you own." The site also lists slop.cash, a platform where users post and fund a problem for a "swarm of contributors, human and machine" to work on. The elizaOS GitHub organisation additionally hosts os, an agent operating system built on elizaOS, Android Open Source and Debian Linux, and a contributor leaderboard.

History: from ai16z to elizaOS

ai16z launched on Solana in October 2024 through the DAOS.FUN platform as a DAO in which token holders interacted with an AI agent, "Marc AIndreessen," built on Eliza, to propose and debate investment ideas, as Decrypt reported. The AI16Z token peaked at roughly $2.4 billion in market value in early January 2025, according to CoinDesk.

In January 2025 the project announced it would rebrand as elizaOS after venture firm Andreessen Horowitz asked for the change to avoid confusion with its a16z name, Unchained reported. The token followed later. Under the official migration plan, from 6 November 2025 holders could swap each AI16Z for six ELIZAOS tokens over a 90-day window ending 4 February 2026. The new token was issued on Solana, Ethereum, Base and BNB Chain, with Chainlink CCIP handling cross-chain transfers from launch. Total supply moved to an 11 billion cap, and circulating supply rose from 6.6 billion to about 7.4 billion immediately after the migration.

Token and foundation wind-down

On 16 April 2026, holders represented by Burwick Law filed a class action in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York against Eliza Labs, Shaw Walters, Sebastian Quinn-Watson, the AI16Z DAO and unnamed parties. According to The Crypto Times, the complaint alleged violations of New York consumer-protection law, negligent misrepresentation and unjust enrichment. CoinDesk reported that it claimed the project marketed itself as an autonomous, AI-run venture fund despite insider control, and that holders were diluted during the AI16Z-to-ELIZAOS migration.

In early August 2026, Walters said the case had been settled by transferring the foundation's remaining treasury to the plaintiffs. He described the claims as "ridiculous" but said the team lacked the capital to fight them. "The token is dead. Completely. The foundation is winding down," he said, adding that there would be no further buybacks, foundation support or supply measures. By then ELIZAOS was trading around 97% below the AI16Z peak, according to CoinDesk.

Walters said he retains the intellectual property behind Eliza and will not allow any future token to be attached to it, and that "we're still building Eliza and the underlying OS" as open-source software. The main repository was still receiving updates in September 2026.

Place in the Solana ecosystem

Eliza is one of the best-known pieces of AI agent software to come out of the Solana community. Its origin in the ai16z DAO put it at the centre of the late-2024 AI agent token wave on Solana, and its Solana plugin and wallet tooling let agents built with it read chain data and sign transactions on the network. Following the August 2026 wind-down, the project continues as open-source software with no active token or foundation behind it.