Comment by soulofmischief

It was started by Shaw Walters, a personal friend and sometimes coworker.

The project is centered around a few core goals and a community building a larger ecosystem around the Eliza agentic framework.

It blew up because it caught a lot of hype at the right time. The framework itself is still working towards production-level maturity, but the community around it is certainly active.

The overall goal of the project was to create an on-chain agent that can manage its own assets and act as an investor which considers the input of key stakeholders of the token. Utility remains to be seen, but they are certainly heads down trying to build out their vision.

I can't speak for the average person involved in cryptocurrency because I have generally low opinions of the speculator market which completely shifted the original goals of Bitcoin away from real decentralization and towards centralized financial services in order to meet short-term goals. But certainly Shaw, I, and others in our circle are well aware of a16z and are generally tuned in to the financial and technopolitical landscape.

ai16z was renamed to elizaOS, you can view their website here: https://elizaos.ai/