Original | Odaily Planet Daily ( @OdailyChina )
Author: Azuma ( @azuma_eth )
I never expected that there would be a second round of the uppercase and lowercase war like neiro and NEIRO.
Odaily Note: For the prequel story, please refer to Neiro and NEIRO are listed on Binance together. Is the Meme coin track reaching a turning point?
Today, the controversy surrounding eliza and ELIZA has become the most discussed topic in the market, and even affected the short-term plunge of the popular AI concept meme token ai16z - GMGN data showed that ai16z fell to as low as $0.181, and was temporarily reported at $0.269 as of around 17:30, a 24-hour drop of 35.9%.
Odaily Planet Daily sorts out the ins and outs of the story as follows.
Regardless of the case, the so-called Eliza (or eliza or ELIZA, $ will be added to distinguish it below) originally refers to an AI Agent powered by ai16z. The corresponding avatar of Eliza is shown in the figure below, which is a black-haired orange-dressed girl image based on ai16z.
Eliza did not have any tokens at first. With the continued popularity of ai16z, the image of Eliza itself has certain meme attributes.
Lowercase $eliza goes first
At around 4:00 am Beijing time on November 17 (based on GMGN opening data), the AI Agent token launch platform vvaifu.fun used automatic AI generation to first release the lowercase version of the token $eliza . The team explained that Shaw (founder of ai16z) claimed that he never intended to create the Eliza token, so we took the initiative to do this for the community .
Judging from the official repost of the $eliza team, Shaw did make a similar statement on November 10, and expressed his welcome for the community to launch tokens . Although Shaws original words were to welcome the community to launch Eliza the agent, judging from the statement of CTO (Community Take Over) that followed, Shaw should have meant to welcome the community to launch tokens.
According to the community, in order to repay ai16zs contribution, $eliza also airdropped 7% of the $eliza supply to ai16z as a thank you.
$eliza was enthusiastically welcomed by the community as soon as it was launched, and its price once soared to $0.0566, corresponding to a market value of approximately $56 million.
Capital $ELIZA disrupts the situation
Everything seemed normal, but things suddenly changed on the afternoon of November 19.
Around 2:00 on November 19, the capitalized version of $ELIZA suddenly came out and quickly exceeded the market value of 20 million US dollars within 10 minutes; at 2:30, Shaw posted the contract of $ELIZA directly on X, clearly stating that $ELIZA was the token that ai16z participated in issuing - and at this time, the market value of $ELIZA had already exceeded 50 million US dollars.
As soon as Shaws statement came out, $eliza immediately plummeted, falling rapidly from around US$0.026 to a low of US$0.007 within 5 minutes, with the maximum drop exceeding 70% at one point.
In contrast, $ELIZA continued to rise, breaking through the $0.1 mark at one point, and its corresponding market value exceeded $100 million.
Although Shaw mentioned that 10% of the $ELIZA supply would be airdropped to $eliza holders, $eliza holders obviously did not buy it. The community questioned Shaws behavior of pushing for new coins (he had previously mentioned that he would not issue coins), which damaged the real interests of Eliza fans who originally invested in $eliza.
More importantly, since $ELIZA rose too quickly in the early stage (it had already exploded before Shaw spoke out), it basically left no profit margin for the community, which also intensified the anger of the community. A large number of users even began to accuse Shaw of conspiracy to control the market.
In addition, the community also found out that another partner of ai16z, Logan, was selling $eliza and buying $ELIZA all day, which also exacerbated the decline of $eliza.
Is it lowercase letters taking the lead or uppercase letters stealing the show?
In the dynamics of supporting $ELIZA, Shaw mentioned that we have been planning the token launch with the partner team for the past two weeks. The implication may be that the launch of $ELIZA was not a temporary idea after seeing the success of $eliza, or it may be to explain his own behavior of going back on his word, emphasizing that the launch of $ELIZA was carried out by other partner teams.
As the communitys doubts fermented, Shaw held two more space events and published a long article in response. Shaw mentioned in his response that he had been preparing for the launch of the token with the above-mentioned cooperation team for two weeks. It was originally planned to be released last Friday, but it was temporarily changed to this Monday. Unexpectedly, $eliza, which was issued by an unknown team, suddenly appeared over the weekend... Shaw even directly called the appearance of $eliza a frontrunner and said that he was very sad that the project he had been preparing for a long time was taken away.
On the other hand, the $eliza team believes that Shaws behavior is stealing food from the bowl. The team has responded to X many times, saying that Shaws behavior is just to steal $elizas achievements and take everything for himself; the airdrop of 10% of the tokens to $eliza holders is just because Shaw doesnt want to be too embarrassed...
Community disputes continue, beware of a lose-lose situation
There is constant controversy in the community surrounding the conflict between $eliza and $ELIZA.
The current result is that $eliza has been cut in half again and again, and ai16z has also fallen sharply due to the collateral effect of this incident . Although $ELIZA is still maintaining its upward trend for the time being, the reputation of the token and Shaw himself has also suffered a severe blow.
Currently, $eliza holders prefer to direct the narrative to community power vs. conspiracy group and replicate the story of neiros counterattack on NEIRO. However, as a second performance of a similar plot, the community will inevitably have some aesthetic fatigue. Although $eliza has gradually stabilized at a low level, the rebound trend is not obvious for the time being. Investors still need to be wary of the risk of a weakening narrative, DYOR.
