The Gaia Ecosystem is Evolving

The founding team — Sydney Lai, Shashank Sripada, and I — have resigned our operating roles at Gaia Labs (SayShell Ltd.). I have not sold a single token. I’m staying on as an advisor, and I believe in this network as much as I did the day we joined.

A Change in Governance

I’ll be straight about the why: it came down to governance, and to alignment.

We had a clear plan for the product and for how to resource the product and GTM workstream, and the team wasn’t fully aligned on it. We wanted to put our heads down and build the open-source roadmap we believed in. When the people doing the building and the people steering the entity don’t agree on where focus and resources go, you either resolve it or you make a clean break.

We tried to resolve it, and we kept showing up while we did. None of us has been paid since October. Through all of it, we did our best to work through the issues these changes created — sitting with the partners, vendors, and stakeholders who needed answers, and getting them those answers even while we were chasing the same ones ourselves. We did that because people trusted us, and that was worth honoring.

In the end, the honest move was to step back and let the people who own the entity set its direction.

The original deal was sound: a clear open-source product vision and a clean division of labor — our partners driving market capture and commercial momentum while we did the hard engineering. And it worked. The product shipped, it ran at real scale, and the nodes are open source today.

What we couldn’t get aligned on was where the Labs went next, and how its focus and resources were allocated. We wanted product. That’s the difference that led us out.

This is the moment to draw clean lines between three things that had been tangled together. The Gaia Foundation stewards the open-source protocol and the token treasury. Gaia Labs (SayShell Ltd.), under ByteTrade, manages the token, cap table, investor communications, and exchange engagement, and is leading the restructuring. Commercial execution sits with EVM Systems — the same core team, the commercial arm for Gaia — which activates once the Foundation has the capital to fund it. It’s the separation Aragon and Gnosis made as they matured: not a rupture, just the right architecture for the next stage.

For investors, their investment terms and rights are unchanged. For token holders, there will be a future for Gaia — the team is now restructuring for the next phase of the project. I’m still a stakeholder, no bridges burned, and I still want this protocol to win.

Here’s the context, because the fact doesn’t mean much without it.

When we started Gaia, my co-founders and I were focused on the building toward the future of work. We saw a lot of projects building world changing technology in internet-native governance of assets, automated payments in exchange for output, and digital identity, reputation built on timestamped credentials on a ledger.

All of this, fancy in theory, bureaucratic and messy in reality. We saw DAOs fall to their knees, we saw onlookers applaud to the demise of democracy as best as we knew it in capital systems. The problem was that none of this was built for us - we created the patterns, but this system was for the machine economy. Governance, automated payment and financial rails, identity, reputation systems. All the bells and whistles AI and AI agents would need to coordinate resources such as compute, data, intelligence — and in today’s paradigm, context or applied context.

We just hadn’t said it out loud yet.

Where It Started

This began in the fall of 2023. By ETH Denver in February 2024 we’d decided to jump in as co-founders with the team that had been incubating Gaia. By May 2024, we were full-time on the future of the decentralized AI ecosystem.

The first product was the Gaia node — an agent, and more than an agent. In 2024 it was an open-source container you could deploy on your own machine in under five minutes from the CLI: a packaged vector database, a RAG pipeline, a prompt manager, an API server so any permissioned party could talk to it, and an integration layer for any of the roughly 2 million open-source models on HuggingFace. The catch was that training the RAG by hand still took days.

The Gaia node was early, and almost nobody understood it at the time. This was pre-Eliza, pre-OpenClaw, pre-Hermes — the harnesses that make it obvious simply didn’t exist yet. Now they do. With OpenClaw, Hermes, and XO (beta.xo.builders), you can one-click a Gaia node from a text message and train its knowledge base the same way, over text. The part that gets interesting is what you build on top of that runtime: private, permissioned, and external-facing environments where agents share context strictly on your terms.

If you want to help build that open-source future with the Gaia ecosystem, my DMs are open. Happy to guide folks to the proper channels.

What We Executed

It’s worth pausing on what this team actually accomplished, because none of it was inevitable and all of it was earned.

Scale & infrastructure

• 710,000+ active nodes across consumer, edge, and cloud
• 30+ trillion real inference requests processed at production scale
• Delivered EdgeOS, Console, and core infrastructure tooling for deploying and routing inference
• Built at a fraction of the capital our peers (TAO, Ritual, Gensyn) needed to reach comparable scale

Token, governance & identity

• Publicly announced a $20M raise
• Launched the $GAIA token and established a liquid market across major exchanges; listed on KuCoin, Kraken, and Bitget
• Stood up the Gaia Foundation, DAO, delegates, and Security Council, with on-chain vesting
• Designed and finalized the GAIA staking architecture
• Launched Gaia Domains (~3,000 shortnames) as a persistent identity layer

Product, partners & reach

• Developed consumer hardware — the Gaia AI Phone on Samsung Galaxy S25
• Completed 110+ strategic integrations across wallets, L2s, agent frameworks, and payments (Coinbase, Base, EigenLayer, Recall, OpenLedger, and more)
• Built a community of 437K+ social followers, 160K on Discord, 166K on Telegram, and 2.9M+ website users
• Activated a global network of 65+ ambassadors
• Featured in Forbes, Cointelegraph, and Analytics India Mag as a leading voice in decentralized AI

That foundation is the thing everything else stands on.

What’s Next for Gaia

The network is in steady hands. With the restructuring underway, the ByteTrade team continues to build — including Olares, their sovereign hardware platform — and the network keeps running.

Whether the Foundation decides to move forward on Gaia v2 is currently left as an open proposal.

On the Gaia AI Phone

and I want to address this directly. We made the call to roll it back. Shipping hardware halfway is worse than not shipping it at all, and the people who pre-ordered deserve better than that.

The Labs, under its current ownership, has taken on the device refunds and is working with the partners involved to make pre-order buyers whole.

What we’re leaving behind is open: we’re releasing Gaia Edge OSS — the on-device local inference and agentic-skills software we built — so it can run on millions of devices across many hardware partners instead of being locked to one SKU. The software belongs to the community now. That’s what “open” actually means in practice. It costs us something, and it’s still the right call.

What the Future of AI Looks Like

Fast forward to 2026. AI is going parabolic — closer to some AGI paradigm, closer to a world where it’s genuinely hard to tell whose data is whose. It’s hard to keep pushing this manifesto when Claude is this good and keeps disrupting vertical after vertical — and when, frankly, people keep asking why you’d bother. But that has always been the tension, and it’s the right one to sit in. Closed and open will coexist. The future is collaborative: massive frontier models with serious compute, open local models on edge devices, and agents working on behalf of other agents. The only real question is whether the open layer is worth building, maintaining, and defending. We still believe the answer is yes.

Here’s why it matters in practice. I’ve written before about the Billion Agent Economy, and about what it does to human work in really halves of the same argument. Agents need to run everywhere, hold context across sessions, pay for knowledge automatically, and coordinate without a human in the critical path. And the people with real context should earn from it directly.

Think about an e-commerce merchant. Their real edge is context no marketplace can see — live inventory, true margins, what actually sells together, which SKUs to push this week. As shopping agents become the buyers, that merchant runs a node that lets a buyer’s agent check fit, availability, and price in real time, and earns on every query that converts — instead of renting that visibility back from a platform that owns the customer.

The same logic runs for a DeFi trader who’d rather sell access to a signal node that nets $1,000 than watch someone burn a hundred hours rebuilding it. A professor monetizing their knowledge as it moves across AI systems.

A doctor running a private local model on their own hardware, sharing inference only when there’s genuine demand to their patients in a private, secure environment. None of them should have to route every query through a frontier provider at three cents a call. They should run their own node, earn from their own knowledge, and participate in a network that rewards specialization over scale.

Gaia v2: An Open Proposal

Gaia v2 is on the table — but it’s a proposal, not a fully approved plan by Gaia key stakeholders. I have brought it to the Foundation in my advisory role on the Technical Security Council, and we have not reached alignment with the Labs on it. That decision is theirs to make.

The proposal is the natural next step the original node was always reaching for: turning the 710,000+ inference nodes into agentic nodes — active memory, MCP discoverability, x402 earnings, verifiable on-chain identity — with node v2, domains v2, workspaces, and private, permissioned environments where nodes discover, talk to, and pay one another directly. The work is shovel-ready and the runtime to build it exists. We’re ready whenever they are.

What’s Next for Me

I’m full-time on XO (xo.builders) — the runtime where agents go to work. It’s a separate company, with its own team and its own backers, and it’s where my focus lives for the foreseeable future. The bet is simple: building an agent is easy now; running fleets of them in production is not. Agents are employees now — they onboard, they offboard, and almost no one has answered what data an agent gets access to or what it’s allowed to leave with.

Organizations need permissioning, governance, and payment rails just to let swarms collaborate safely, and that infrastructure mostly doesn’t exist yet. XO is built for it: open, composable, and designed so your team owns its context and can move its whole stack as the industry shifts under us. Shashank is advising, focused on verticalizing agentic orgs for enterprises and embedding XO where real companies operate. A dedicated piece on what we’re shipping at XO is coming; for now, the docs live at docs.xo.builders.

EVM Systems remains the commercial arm for Gaia, and it activates once the Foundation has the capital to fund commercial execution. Until then, my focus is XO. I’m also staying close to Gaia as an advisor and open-source contributor, carrying the v2 proposal through the Technical Security Council. I haven’t sold a token, and I’m not going anywhere as a believer.

Deploy OpenClaw, Hermes & more agents in your infra!

https://xo.builders
https://docs.xo.builders
https://beta.xo.builders

To Everyone Who’s Been Here

To the 710,000 node operators who kept this network running. To the 110+ partners who integrated before anyone else believed the thesis. To the OpenClaw builders, the developers running inference on hardware they own, and the investors and advisors who took the bet early.

Thank you. The mission continues. Just from a few different seats now.

Onward.

— Matt Wright
Advisor, Gaia Foundation
Co-founder, evmsystems.ai