Moemate

Status: shut down. Moemate was an AI companion and agent app made by Webaverse, a San Francisco startup. Users built AI characters with their own personality, voice and 3D avatar, then talked to them by text or voice. Its best-known trick was screen vision: the character could look at your desktop and comment on it.

Moemate launched publicly in October 2023. In January 2025 it added a Solana token, MATES, and claimed more than 6 million users. About four weeks later, in February 2025, the service went offline for good. As of October 2026, moemate.io does not resolve, and no official successor has appeared.

Why did Moemate shut down?

Moemate closed in February 2025. Later write-ups give the same main reason: it cost more to run than it earned. Every chat paid for GPT-4 or Claude, plus voice cloning and image tools, and subscriptions didn't cover the bill. Shaky servers and the cost of policing an "uncensored" chat app made it worse. The Questie and Skywork retrospectives both describe a sudden closure, not a wind-down.

User data did not survive. Custom characters, chat histories, voice clones and generated images were lost when the service went dark. Reports describe refunds limited to recent subscribers, not long-term payers.

The timing is what made the shutdown controversial in crypto circles. The MATES token went live on January 14, 2025, sold partly to the public on the promise of a growing agent ecosystem. The product that ecosystem rested on was gone within a month. No detailed post-mortem from Webaverse has surfaced.

What was Moemate AI and how did it work?

Moemate started as a desktop assistant for Mac, Windows and Linux. TechCrunch tested the open beta in August 2023. It found an anime-style avatar that could read your whole screen and answer questions about it. Moemate did not build its own AI. It stitched together other firms' models. GPT-4 and Anthropic's Claude did the talking. Stable Diffusion made the images. Voices came from ElevenLabs, Microsoft Azure or Moemate's own engine.

The October 2023 launch announcement set out the full feature list:

• custom characters based on fictional figures or real likenesses;
• 3D animated avatars with spoken conversation in more than 100 languages;
• a choice of eight premium language models and 30+ image models;
• web search, screen perception, image and selfie generation, voice cloning and custom image-model training.

Webaverse said much of the chat history and preference data stayed on the user's device. TechCrunch noted the privacy policy still allowed collection of device data, and called giving software sight of everything on your screen "a considerable risk".

Moemate AI agents on X, Telegram and Discord

By January 2025 Moemate had pivoted. It now sold itself as a place to build AI agents without code. The MATES launch release said its agents could post on X, Telegram and Discord. They could see through a screen or camera, live inside games and VR, and trade on-chain. Rivals ai16z and Virtuals were aimed at coders. Moemate's pitch was that anyone could build an agent.

The same release claimed 6 million+ users, 500,000+ community-built agents and over 30 minutes of daily use per user. These are the team's own figures and were never independently audited. It also cited a Moemate-built agent, Nebula (ticker MOE), as an example of an "internet celebrity" character.

MATES token on Solana

MATES was Moemate's token, launched on Solana on January 14, 2025. Total supply is 19.5 billion. The mint address is MAtesZXcU38mgPuteRFo9ApCauYRRuwn3xf1cs5y7ZX (CoinMarketCap). Part of the supply was sold in an IDO on PAID Network's launchpad. Trackers disagree on the sale price, so we don't repeat one here.

The promised holder benefits were airdrops from agent tokens that "graduated" on Moemate, access to curated Moemate launches, and a share in the agent network's growth. The team also announced Agent Dojo, an incubator for flagship agents, with KIPprotocol and AethirCloud as partners.

None of those benefits outlived the app. MATES hit its all-time high of about $0.0127 on January 22, 2025, per CoinMarketCap, then fell more than 99%. The token still exists on-chain and trades thinly, but nobody is building anything behind it. The price widget on this page shows the current figure.

Is Moemate safe? Risks for MATES holders and former users

• No operator. The app, website and official socials are gone, so the token has no product, roadmap or team accountable for it.
• Lookalike sites. moemate.chat ranks for the name but says it is not operated by or affiliated with Webaverse; its sign-up buttons send visitors to a different chat service. Treat any site, app or "Moemate 2.0" offering a relaunch, data recovery or a token migration as unofficial unless Webaverse confirms it.
• Lost data. Former users cannot recover characters or chats. There is no export route today.
• Illiquid token. Thin liquidity means even small sells move the price a lot.
• Team history. Webaverse co-founder Ahad Shams lost $4 million in USDC to scammers posing as investors at a meeting in Rome in November 2022, disclosed in February 2023. This was a social-engineering theft, not a flaw in Moemate, but it shaped how some in crypto viewed the team.

Who was Moemate for?

At its peak, Moemate suited people who wanted a customisable AI character they could talk to by voice, especially one that could see their screen while they worked or gamed. It was less suited to anyone who needed their chats or characters kept long term: the product was a closed, hosted service, and it took all user data with it.

Today it is not for anyone. There is no product to use, and MATES is a speculative token with no team behind it.

Moemate alternatives

For AI character chat, the mainstream option is Character.AI. Search results and retrospectives also point former users to CrushOn AI for unfiltered roleplay and Questie for voice chat while gaming, the use case closest to Moemate's screen vision. We haven't tested these and aren't endorsing any of them.

For AI agents on Solana and X, the tools Moemate compared itself with are still the main ones: ai16z's ElizaOS and Virtuals. Both need some coding skill. That was the gap Moemate said it would fill.

Who was behind Moemate?

Moemate was built by Webaverse. Its co-founders include Ahad Shams and Adrian Biedrzycki, known as Avaer. Voices of VR names Biedrzycki as co-founder of both Webaverse and Moemate. Webaverse began as a metaverse you could play in a web browser. It switched to AI companions with Moemate in 2023. In January 2025 it moved again, to AI agents and a Solana token. The shutdown came weeks later.

Timeline

• August 2023: open beta, reviewed by TechCrunch.
• October 25, 2023: public launch announced.
• January 14, 2025: MATES token launches on Solana, with Agent Dojo announced alongside.
• January 22, 2025: MATES all-time high.
• February 2025: Moemate shuts down permanently.