What is Venice?
Venice is a private, lightly filtered AI app founded by Erik Voorhees. Its token, VVV, can be staked to earn yield and to mint DIEM, a voucher worth a dollar of AI compute every day. This guide explains how all of it works, who is behind it and what could go wrong, in plain English.
Live market data
The VVV price and market value, fetched live from CoinGecko when your browser allows it. If the feed is unavailable you will see the figures we last checked by hand on 13 October 2026.
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Venice in 60 seconds
Short on time? These six cards are the whole story in plain language. Everything after this section goes deeper.
A private AI app
Venice is a website, mobile app and developer service for chatting with AI, making images and video, and writing code. It looks and feels much like ChatGPT. It launched in May 2024.
Private and uncensored
Venice says it does not keep your conversations on its servers. Your history lives in your own browser. It also applies far fewer content filters than mainstream assistants.
VVV is staked, not spent
VVV is a token on the Base network. You do not pay for prompts with it. You stake it, which earns newly issued VVV and gives you the right to mint a second token called DIEM.
DIEM is daily compute
Each staked DIEM gives $1 of credit on Venice's API every day. Developers and AI agents use it to run models without paying per request. DIEM can also be bought and sold.
Fewer new tokens, some burned
Venice has cut new VVV issuance from about 14 million a year to 2 million, and uses part of its revenue to buy VVV and destroy it. Whether burns outpace issuance depends on revenue and price.
One company decides
Venice is a private company, not a decentralised network. VVV holders own no part of it and cannot vote. Emissions, burns and DIEM rules are set by the company and have changed often.
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Origins: why a crypto veteran built an AI app
Venice did not come out of an AI lab. It came from a man who had spent a decade arguing with regulators about who gets to see your money, and who decided the same argument was about to be had over your thoughts.
The problem Venice set out to solve
When you type into a mainstream AI assistant, your words travel to a company's servers, are processed there and are normally stored against your account. That history is useful. It lets you pick up old conversations. It also creates a detailed record of what you asked about your health, your money, your work and your private worries, held by a company that can be hacked, subpoenaed or simply change its policies.
The second complaint is about control. Mainstream models are trained and instructed to refuse certain requests and to steer answers on contested subjects. Supporters call this safety. Critics, Erik Voorhees among them, call it censorship and say adults should decide for themselves what to ask a machine.
Venice's answer to both was simple to state. Run open-source models, which anyone can inspect and host. Do not keep the conversations. Remove most of the filters.
From ShapeShift to Venice
Voorhees was already well known in crypto. He had run the bitcoin gambling site SatoshiDice, worked at the early exchange BitInstant, and in 2014 founded ShapeShift, an exchange that for years let people swap coins without creating an account. That model eventually collided with regulators. In March 2024 ShapeShift settled with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, agreeing to a $275,000 penalty and a cease-and-desist order, according to Decrypt's report.
Two months later, on 10 May 2024, he announced Venice. He told Decrypt the aim was to keep AI from being captured by large technology companies, and argued that open-source, decentralised alternatives were the remedy. The first version offered text chat built on Meta's Llama 3 and image generation with Stable Diffusion models. A Pro plan cost $49 a year. Holders of one Morpheus token, from a related open-AI project, got Pro for free.
He was candid about the limits. Venice was not zero-knowledge, he said. The graphics chip running the model has to see the text of your prompt in order to answer it. What Venice promised was that the prompt would not be stored and would not be tied to your identity.
Why the name?
The historical Republic of Venice was a trading city that grew rich by being open to merchants from everywhere. Voorhees has described the company's ideal in similar terms, as an open and permissive port city that respects the independence of the people, and the software agents, who pass through it. This site borrows the same imagery for its own artwork, which is original and not Venice's logo.
Bootstrapped first, token second, investors last
Venice did things in an unusual order. It launched a product with no outside investors. Eight months later, in January 2025, it launched the VVV token with no presale, giving half the supply away. Only in July 2026, with millions of users and a profitable quarter behind it, did it take venture capital, and then it sold company shares rather than tokens. Voorhees has pointed to this order as the opposite of most crypto projects, which sell tokens to investors before there is a product. Critics reply that it leaves two classes of stakeholder with different rights. Both views are covered in the risks section.
Public launch: 10 May 2024
First models: Llama 3 variants, Stable Diffusion XL, Playground v2.5
First price: Pro at $49 a year
Sign-in: email, Apple, Google, Discord or a crypto wallet
Outside funding at launch: none
At launch Voorhees told Decrypt Venice would never provide Claude or OpenAI's models. By 2026 Venice offered both, relayed through its proxy in what it calls Anonymous mode. The company's case is that hiding your identity from those providers is still an improvement. It is also a reminder that Venice's positions evolve.
450,000 registered users at the token launch (Jan 2025)
870,000 by March 2025
3 million in April 2026
More than 4 million by September 2026
User counts are company statements and include free accounts.
Timeline: 2024 to October 2026
Two and a half years, from a chatbot with no investors to a billion-dollar company with two tokens. Filter by theme.
- People
Voorhees launches SatoshiDice
Years before Venice, Erik Voorhees builds a bitcoin dice game that at one point accounts for about half of all Bitcoin transactions. He sells it in 2013 for bitcoin then worth about $11.5 million.
- People
ShapeShift is founded
Voorhees starts ShapeShift, an exchange with no accounts, in the aftermath of the Mt. Gox collapse. Its no-identity model later draws regulatory heat.
- Trouble
ShapeShift settles with the SEC
ShapeShift agrees to a $275,000 penalty and a cease-and-desist order over its earlier exchange business, as reported by Decrypt. Voorhees is already working on something new.
- Product
Venice launches to the public
Venice opens as a private, uncensored chatbot and image generator built on open-source models such as Llama 3. Pro costs $49 a year at launch.
- Product
API beta for Pro users
Venice releases a beta of its developer API, which lets other apps and AI agents use its models.
- Token
Airdrop snapshot
Venice records which users have at least 25 points. That list decides who can claim VVV a month later.
- Token
VVV launches on Base
100 million VVV are created with no presale. Half is set aside for an airdrop to Venice users and to crypto AI communities on Base. Coinbase lists the token on launch day and its valuation briefly reaches about $1.6 billion.
- Token
The great burn
The 45-day claim window closes. About 17.4 million VVV were claimed by more than 40,000 people. Venice burns 32.6 million unclaimed tokens plus about 1 million it had bought back, 33.5 million in total.
- People
Jesse Proudman steps forward as CTO
GeekWire profiles Seattle entrepreneur Jesse Proudman as Venice's chief technology officer. The company reports more than 850,000 registered users and about 20 staff.
- Trouble
Security researchers raise the alarm
Mobile security firm Certo reports that Venice is being discussed on hacking forums and that in its tests the service wrote working malware and scam messages.
- Token
DIEM launches
Venice introduces DIEM, a token minted by locking staked VVV. Each staked DIEM gives $1 a day of API credit. Annual VVV emissions fall from 14 million to 10 million and all of them now go to stakers.
- Token
Monthly buy-and-burn begins
Venice starts using part of its monthly revenue to buy VVV on the open market and burn it. VVV trades near its lows around this time, by several accounts.
- Token
Emissions cut to 6 million
Venice's help centre records a cut to 6 million VVV a year, after an earlier step down to 8 million.
- Product
3 million users
Voorhees says Venice passed 3 million users in April and became profitable in the first quarter. Both figures are company statements.
- Token
Monthly emission cuts start
Emissions step down by a million a year each month: 5 million from 1 May, 4 million from 1 June and 3 million from 1 July.
- Token
Upbit lists VVV
South Korea's largest exchange opens VVV markets against the won, bitcoin and USDT.
- Product
Agentic chat becomes the default
The Venice app switches to a chat that can search, reason, make images and create video in one conversation. An MCP server with 31 tools ships for developers.
- People
$65 million Series A at a $1 billion valuation
Dragonfly leads Venice's first outside round. Investors get 8.98% of the company's equity plus a 1.5 million VVV grant and warrants for 5 million more. Critics ask what token holders get.
- Token
Programmatic burn and a bigger DIEM target
Venice begins burning $5 of VVV for every $100 of API credit sold and raises the DIEM supply target from 38,000 to 40,000 in steps through 14 September.
- Product
$100 million revenue run rate
Voorhees announces that annualised revenue has passed $100 million, up from a reported $70 million or so in July.
- Token
Emissions cut to 2.5 million
Another step down. During September VVV sets an all-time high above $34, according to CoinGecko data cited by Crypto Briefing.
- Product
Circle Agent Marketplace integration
Venice announces an integration that lets AI agents pay for its services in USDC without a human in the loop.
- Token
Emissions cut to 2 million
Annual issuance is now about 86% below the launch rate. Cumulative burns stand above 33.7 million VVV.
- Token
VVV arrives on Solana
A canonical VVV is issued on Solana through Sunrise, with trading on venues such as Raydium.
How Venice works
Venice has two layers. The first is an ordinary AI service: an app in front, graphics chips behind. The second is a pair of tokens that turn access to those chips into something you can stake, lock and trade. Take them one at a time.
Layer one: the AI service
Venice does not train its own large models. It is best understood as a carefully built front door to other people's models. Some are open-source, such as Llama, Qwen, DeepSeek, GLM and the Dolphin family, which Venice or its partners host on rented graphics processors. Others are closed frontier models from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and xAI, which Venice reaches through those companies' own services. In 2026 the catalogue passed 200 models covering text, images, video, speech, music and code.
On top of the models sit the products: a chat app that can search the web and call tools, image and video studios, custom characters, a mobile app, and a developer API that copies the format of OpenAI's so existing software can switch with little work.
Where the privacy comes from
Three design choices do most of the work.
Local history. Your conversations are saved in your browser or app, not in a Venice database. If you clear your browser storage they are gone, and they do not automatically appear on your other devices.
A relay that forgets. Every request passes through Venice's proxy, which forwards it to a machine running the model and streams the answer back. Venice says the proxy does not store prompts or responses.
Identity kept apart. The machine that runs the model receives the text but not your account details.
How much you have to take on trust depends on which of four privacy modes a model uses. Try them below.
Who can see your prompt?
Pick a privacy mode and follow your prompt from your device to the model. Based on Venice's published privacy page.
Deep dive: what a TEE actually is
A trusted execution environment is a sealed area inside a processor. Code and data inside it are encrypted in memory, so that even the company that owns the machine cannot read them. The chip can also produce an attestation, a signed statement of exactly which software it is running, that anyone can check.
Venice's documentation says its TEE models run on Intel TDX and NVIDIA confidential computing hardware, operated by partners that its privacy page names as NEAR AI Cloud and Phala Network. In E2EE mode your device first checks the attestation, then encrypts the prompt so that only that enclave can open it. Venice's proxy passes along ciphertext it cannot read.
The trade-offs are real. Fewer models are available, answers can be slower, and E2EE switches off web search, file uploads, memory and tool use. TEEs have also had security flaws discovered in the past, so they reduce the trust required without removing it.
Deep dive: what "uncensored" means in practice
Open-source models can be run with any instructions the host likes. Venice hosts versions with light instructions and offers models that have been deliberately tuned to refuse less. Adult users can switch off safe mode for images. GeekWire reported in 2025 that Venice's system prompt tells models to worry less about causing offence.
It is not a free-for-all. The company says it keeps safeguards against abuse and illegal activity, though it has not described them in detail. Models reached in Anonymous mode keep whatever rules their makers trained into them. And some users complain that Venice refuses things its marketing suggests it would allow.
Deep dive: paying for Venice without tokens
Most users never touch VVV. In 2026 the consumer plans were a free tier, Pro at $18 a month, Pro Plus at $68 and Max at $200, with video and music drawing on a monthly pool of credits. Developers can buy API credit in dollars by card or with crypto at the same rates, or pay per request with stablecoins using the x402 standard. Venice's price list shows per-million-token rates for each model, with open models costing cents and frontier models dollars.
Layer two: VVV, sVVV and DIEM
Now the crypto part. It has three moving pieces.
VVV is the base token. It lives on the Base network, with a bridged version on Solana since October 2026.
sVVV is what you hold after staking VVV in Venice's contract. Staked tokens earn a share of all newly issued VVV. By several reports, staking a modest amount also unlocks Pro-level features in the app. To go back to liquid VVV you must wait out a seven-day cooldown.
DIEM is the compute voucher. You create it by locking sVVV. Each DIEM you then stake produces $1 of Venice API credit every day. The credit refreshes daily and does not accumulate, so unused credit is lost at the end of the day. You need at least a tenth of a DIEM staked to receive any.
How the design changed in August 2025
In the first version, launched in January 2025, there was no DIEM token. Staking 1% of all staked VVV simply gave you 1% of Venice's daily API capacity, and the word "Diem" was only a unit of account equal to $1 of credit. Your allowance therefore moved up and down as other people staked and as Venice added capacity.
On 20 August 2025 Venice replaced that with DIEM as a real, transferable token. The point was predictability and tradability. One DIEM is always $1 a day, whoever holds it, and a developer who needs compute can buy DIEM on the market without touching VVV at all. A VVV staker who does not need compute can mint DIEM and sell it.
The mint rate: why DIEM gets expensive to create
Venice cannot hand out unlimited $1-a-day vouchers, because every one of them is a claim on real graphics chips. So it sets a target supply of DIEM that reflects the capacity it is willing to commit, and makes minting more expensive as the supply approaches that target. The number of sVVV you must lock to mint one DIEM is called the mint rate. Venice describes the curve as starting low and rising exponentially.
In practice the target was 38,000 DIEM for the first year. In July 2026 Venice announced the first increase, to 40,000, phased in by mid-September. A community newsletter recorded the mint rate at about 518 sVVV per DIEM in August 2026 with supply at roughly 96% of target, down from a peak near 685 in April.
When someone burns DIEM to unlock their sVVV, supply falls and the mint rate eases for the next person.
The DIEM mint curve
The curve here is an illustration fitted loosely to two published data points. It is not Venice's contract formula, which the company has not set out in its public posts. The DIEM market price default comes from an August 2026 research note and will be out of date. Minting locks your sVVV rather than spending it, and burning the DIEM returns it.
Mint or buy?
Because minting is deliberately expensive near the target, DIEM on the open market has usually cost far less than the dollar value of sVVV you would need to lock to mint one. Alea Research put the gap at about five times in April 2026, and the Spartan Group measured $6,283 of locked sVVV against a market price of $1,362 that August. That gap is the system saying capacity is close to full.
The two routes are not equivalent, though. A buyer spends money and owns a voucher whose market price can fall. A minter keeps ownership of the underlying VVV, keeps earning 80% of normal staking yield on it, and can reverse the trade by burning DIEM. A minter who sells their DIEM takes on a debt in kind: to unlock their sVVV later they must buy DIEM back at whatever it then costs. Venice itself calls repeated mint-and-sell a high-risk strategy.
Staking yield, in numbers
All newly issued VVV goes to stakers, shared in proportion to stake. If 2 million VVV a year are issued and 33 million are staked, each staked token earns about 6% a year in new tokens. If more people stake, the percentage falls. sVVV that is locked behind DIEM earns 80% of the normal rate, and the remaining 20% goes to Venice, which analysts say feeds its burns. The yield is paid in VVV, so its dollar value moves with the price, and it is funded by dilution of everyone who does not stake rather than by company profits.
Staking yield estimator
The total staked figure is an assumption, back-calculated from an April 2026 research note that quoted an 18% rate when emissions were 6 million a year. Check a live dashboard for the current number. This is arithmetic, not a promise of returns.
Putting the whole loop together
A user pays Venice dollars for a subscription or API credit. Venice pays for graphics chips and keeps a margin. Part of the revenue buys VVV on the market and burns it. Separately, new VVV is issued to stakers. Stakers can lock their position to mint DIEM, and DIEM holders draw compute from Venice every day. If demand for compute rises, more people want DIEM, more sVVV gets locked, and Venice sells more credit, which funds more burns. If demand falls, each of those links runs in reverse. The tokenomics section looks at the numbers.
Tokenomics: VVV supply, emissions and burns
VVV started with a round number, lost a third of it in one afternoon, and has been pulled in two directions ever since: new tokens paid to stakers on one side, buy-and-burn on the other. Here is the ledger.
The genesis allocation
The original 100 million VVV were divided as below. Tap a segment for the detail.
The airdrop and the burn
Half the supply, 50 million VVV, was offered free. One half of that went to Venice users who had been active since October 2024 and held at least 25 points at the 31 December snapshot. The company said more than 100,000 accounts qualified. The other half went to crypto AI communities on Base, including holders and agents linked to Virtuals, Aerodrome, Degen, aixbt, Clanker and Morpheus, among others.
Recipients had 45 days to claim. When the window shut on 12 March 2025, about 17.4 million tokens had been claimed by more than 40,000 people, according to The Block. Venice burned the remaining 32.6 million. It also burned about 1 million VVV that it had bought back after the team sold 1% of supply on launch day. Venice's help centre gives the combined figure as 33,539,739 VVV, worth roughly $100 million at the time.
The effect was to shrink the supply by a third and to raise every remaining holder's share, including the company's own.
Emissions: the shrinking tap
New VVV is created continuously and paid to stakers. The rate has been cut again and again. Tap a bar to see when and why.
Annual VVV issuance, step by step
Sources disagree on the early steps. Venice's launch post and its DIEM announcement give 14 million a year at launch and 10 million from 20 August 2025. Venice's own help centre summarises the history as 10 million, then 8 million, then 6 million in February 2026, without dating the 8 million step. Crypto Briefing lists the 2026 steps. We show the reading that fits all three.
Who gets the new tokens
Until August 2025, each year's issuance was split between stakers and Venice according to a utilisation rate that tracked API demand, with stakers receiving somewhere between 20% and 80%. Since the DIEM launch, 100% goes to stakers, except that sVVV locked behind DIEM earns 80% and the other 20% goes to Venice. There is no separate allocation of new tokens to the team or a foundation.
Burns: three channels
Venice began buying VVV with revenue and burning it in late 2025. By mid-2026 there were three channels, as described by the Spartan Group and by Venice's own announcements:
Discretionary monthly burns. Venice decides each month how much revenue to spend. Spartan estimated this at about 60% of burn value in July 2026.
Per-subscription burns. A fixed $2, $5 or $10 of VVV is bought and burned for each new Pro, Pro Plus or Max subscription. About 21%.
Programmatic API burns. From 17 July 2026, $5 of every $100 of API credit purchased buys and burns VVV. About 19%.
Spartan put the annualised value of all burns at about $5.4 million in July 2026. Note the unit. Burns are budgeted in dollars, so as the VVV price rises the same budget destroys fewer tokens. An Alea Research digest noted that monthly tokens burned fell from about 57,000 in December 2025 to under 10,000 in June 2026 as the price climbed.
Is VVV deflationary?
Venice describes VVV as a long-term deflationary asset, and that is its stated goal rather than an established fact. Supply only shrinks if tokens burned exceed tokens issued. At 2 million VVV a year of issuance and a price in the low twenties, matching issuance would take more than $40 million a year of burns, several times the July 2026 pace. Revenue has been growing quickly and emissions keep falling, so the gap has been narrowing. Use the tool below to see how the balance moves.
Burn versus issuance
Venice does not publish a fixed share of revenue for burns. The 5% default roughly matches the $5.4 million annualised figure reported for July 2026. A scenario tool, not a forecast.
Why "circulating" is so much less than "total"
CoinGecko showed about 48.4 million VVV circulating against a total of about 81.1 million in October 2026. The difference of roughly 33 million is mostly held by Venice itself. Voorhees said in July 2026 that the company held more than 30 million VVV and that neither it nor the team had sold any during that year's rally. Those tokens are not on the market today. They could be in future, which is why some analysts prefer to value the token on its fully diluted figure.
The team's own 10 million allocation unlocked 25% at launch, with the rest streaming over 24 months, which means that stream completes around January 2027.
The Series A token terms
The July 2026 investors bought equity, but tokens were part of the package. According to The Block, they received a grant of 1.5 million VVV and warrants to buy 5 million more over eight years, all locked for a year and then vesting over three more. If every warrant is exercised Venice would receive about $66.5 million. Voorhees estimated that this would release under 6,000 VVV a day once vesting starts in mid-2027. The tokens come from Venice's existing treasury rather than new issuance.
Deep dive: contract addresses
VVV on Base: 0xacfE6019Ed1A7Dc6f7B508C02d1b04ec88cC21bf
DIEM on Base: 0xf4d97f2da56e8c3098f3a8d538db630a2606a024
VVV on Solana (canonical mint via Sunrise, as reported by Crypto Briefing): VVV4UdRywr7SLafPHzqXwRCw7myXkmgCtitXUvj8g8c
Copied from Venice's blog posts, CoinGecko and press reports in October 2026. Always confirm against venice.ai before sending money. Tokens with the same ticker and different addresses are common and usually worthless.
Deep dive: reading the supply numbers yourself
Start at 100 million. Subtract the 33.54 million burned in March 2025, leaving 66.46 million. Add emissions since launch: roughly seven months at 14 million a year, then declining rates through 2026, which comes to something like 15 to 16 million. Subtract the smaller revenue-funded burns since late 2025. You arrive near the 81 million total that CoinGecko reports. The exact live figure can be read from the token contract on BaseScan.
People and organisations
Venice is a company with a chief executive, a payroll and shareholders. Understanding who they are matters more here than for a decentralised network, because these are the people who set every parameter of the token.
- Role
- Founder and CEO, Venice
- Born
- 1984, Danbury, Connecticut
- Raised
- Colorado
- Education
- University of Puget Sound
- Known for
- SatoshiDice, ShapeShift
- Based
- Panama since 2013, per Wikipedia
Erik Voorhees
Erik Voorhees is one of the longest-serving public figures in cryptocurrency, and one of its most consistent. For fifteen years he has made the same argument in different settings: that individuals should be able to transact, and now think, without asking permission or being watched.
Early years. Born in Connecticut in 1984 and raised in Colorado, Voorhees studied at the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma, Washington, where he met future Venice co-founder Jesse Proudman and, by Wikipedia's account, introduced fellow student Nicolas Cary, later a co-founder of Blockchain.com, to Bitcoin. After graduating he worked in Dubai as a communications manager for a property company.
Bitcoin. He came across Bitcoin in 2011, around the time he joined the Free State Project, a movement that encourages libertarians to move to New Hampshire. He worked in marketing and communications at BitInstant, one of the first services for buying bitcoin, and in April 2012 launched SatoshiDice, a simple betting game played by sending bitcoin to an address. It was wildly popular and at one stage generated about half of all Bitcoin transactions. He sold it in 2013 for bitcoin then worth about $11.5 million.
First brush with the SEC. Voorhees had sold shares in SatoshiDice to the public in exchange for bitcoin. In 2014 he paid about $50,000 to settle SEC allegations that these were unregistered securities offerings.
ShapeShift. In July 2014, after the Mt. Gox exchange collapsed and took customers' coins with it, he launched ShapeShift in Switzerland. Its idea was that an exchange should never hold your money: you sent one coin and received another, with no account. For years it also asked for no identification. A 2018 Wall Street Journal investigation reported that nearly $90 million of criminal proceeds had passed through it. ShapeShift later introduced identity checks, then in 2021 began dismantling its corporate structure in favour of a community-run organisation. In March 2024 it settled with the SEC for $275,000.
Other controversies. In 2018 the Wall Street Journal reported that the SEC was examining a $50 million token sale by Salt Lending, where Voorhees had been involved in fundraising. In 2022 he publicly opposed Sam Bankman-Fried's proposals for crypto regulation, weeks before Bankman-Fried's exchange FTX collapsed.
Venice. Voorhees launched Venice in May 2024 and remains its chief executive and public voice. He frames AI surveillance, rather than job losses or runaway models, as the central danger of the technology. When the company raised money in 2026 he said the funds would help extend constitutional protections for speech and privacy to people's dealings with AI.
How to weigh him. Supporters see a founder with a rare record of building products people use and of sticking to his principles at personal cost. Sceptics see a serial tester of regulatory limits whose past ventures drew enforcement action, now in charge of a token with no formal rights attached. Both descriptions rest on the same facts.
Jesse Proudman
A Seattle-based serial entrepreneur. He founded the cloud company Blue Box, bought by IBM in 2015, and co-founded Strix Leviathan, which spun out the crypto investing app Makara. Betterment bought Makara in 2022 and Proudman spent about three years there as a vice-president. He began building Venice on nights and weekends in 2024 before joining full time. He told GeekWire he wants Venice to be spoken of alongside the largest consumer AI products.
The executives
GeekWire's July 2026 report named Austin Virts as vice-president of marketing, Jonathan Shapiro as head of strategy, Tim Shakarian as head of engineering and Johanna Tseng as vice-president of business operations. In March 2025 it had reported Teana Baker-Taylor, formerly of Circle, Crypto.com and Binance, as chief operating officer. We could not confirm her current role.
Venice.ai
Founded in 2024. About 45 employees in mid-2026, up from roughly 15 a year earlier, working remotely with no central office. One industry profile lists a Sheridan, Wyoming registration. The company said it became profitable in the first quarter of 2026. Before the Series A it was owned entirely by its team.
Dragonfly
A crypto-focused venture firm that led the $65 million Series A in July 2026. A Dragonfly partner defended the structure on a podcast by describing VVV as a compute voucher, comparable to buying graphics capacity in advance, rather than as a form of equity.
The Series A syndicate
Coinbase Ventures, North Island Ventures, F-Prime, Archetype, Liquid2 Ventures, Morgan Creek and Seattle's Founders' Co-op were named across reports by The Block and GeekWire. Together the round bought 8.98% of the company.
The machines behind it
Venice rents most of its graphics processors. Its privacy page names NEAR AI Cloud and Phala Network as operators of the secure enclaves used for TEE and E2EE models. Frontier models come from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and xAI. Coinbase's Base network hosts the tokens, and Aerodrome hosts their main on-chain markets.
The watchers
Alea Research and the Spartan Group have published detailed studies of the token. A community site, Venice Stats, tracks staking, burns and DIEM figures from on-chain data. None is part of Venice.
The sceptics
Ethereum researcher Dankrad Feist publicly criticised the split between equity and token after the Series A. Security firm Certo documented misuse of the product in 2025. Their arguments appear in the risks section.
No foundation, no DAO
Unlike many crypto projects, Venice has no non-profit foundation and no token-holder voting. That makes the organisation chart simple. It also means there is nobody whose job is to represent VVV holders.
Ecosystem: who uses Venice
Venice has two audiences that barely overlap: ordinary people who want a private chatbot, and developers and AI agents who want compute. The token mostly serves the second group.
The chat app
The web and mobile apps are where most of the reported 4 million users are. Since May 2026 the default chat is "agentic": it can search, reason, edit images and produce video inside one conversation.
Image and video studios
Dedicated workspaces for generating and editing pictures and clips with models such as Flux, Kling and others. Analysts note that video is a small share of requests but a large share of credit revenue because it is so compute-hungry.
Characters and social feed
Users can create custom personas with their own instructions and share creations in a public feed. Role-play is a significant use of lightly filtered models.
The Venice API
An interface compatible with OpenAI's format. The Spartan Group counted about 1.7 million API calls a day in August 2026. Developers pay with dollar credit, crypto, or staked DIEM.
Coding tools
Alea Research lists integrations with OpenRouter, Brave's Leo assistant, Cursor and VS Code, which let programmers pick Venice as the model provider inside tools they already use.
MCP server
In May 2026 Venice shipped a Model Context Protocol server exposing 31 tools, so that outside assistants and agents can call Venice's search, image and other functions directly.
Agent frameworks
Venice has courted autonomous agents since late 2024, when it integrated with the Eliza framework. A quarter of the genesis VVV supply was aimed at crypto AI communities and agent accounts on Base.
Pay-per-request with x402
Agents can pay for individual API calls in stablecoins using the x402 standard, on Base and, since May 2026, on Solana. No account or card is needed.
Circle Agent Marketplace
Announced on 18 September 2026. The integration lets agents settle Venice services in USDC, according to Crypto Briefing.
Base and Aerodrome
VVV and DIEM are ERC-20 tokens on Base. Aerodrome hosts the deepest on-chain liquidity for both and was seeded from the 5% liquidity allocation at launch.
Solana via Sunrise
Since 6 October 2026 a canonical VVV exists on Solana and trades on venues such as Raydium. Staking and DIEM minting remain on Base.
Exchanges
Coinbase listed VVV on launch day in January 2025. Upbit added it in May 2026. KuCoin lists a spot market, and reports describe VVV perpetual futures on Binance.
How big is token usage compared with the business?
This is a fair question and the honest answer is: small. An on-chain review cited by Alea Research in July 2026 found about 14,400 unique staking addresses and about 4,600 holders of DIEM, against millions of app users. The DIEM target of 40,000 represents at most $40,000 a day of API credit, or about $14.6 million a year, beside a claimed revenue run rate above $100 million. Most of Venice's customers pay in dollars and never touch the token. The token economy is a side door into the service, not its main entrance.
Roadmap and what comes next
Venice does not publish a long formal roadmap. What follows is drawn from what the company and its investors have said they intend to do, with the usual warning that plans change.
Owning its own chips
The main stated use of the Series A money is to build Venice's own compute, starting with a first data centre, so that it owns graphics processors rather than renting them. Voorhees argued that this secures capacity and raises gross margins, which in turn would make larger VVV burns affordable. It also turns a light software business into a capital-heavy one.
More DIEM capacity
The DIEM target rose from 38,000 to 40,000 in 2026, the first increase. If Venice adds capacity it can raise the target further, which lowers the mint rate and lets more sVVV be locked. Each increase also adds to the daily compute Venice has promised to honour.
Lower emissions, larger burns
Venice has said it intends to keep reducing issuance over time and to keep using revenue for buybacks. No schedule beyond the 2 million rate had been published when we checked in October 2026.
Growth and acquisitions
The company told The Block it would expand into new markets, hire, and buy businesses that add to its product. Headcount tripled in the year to mid-2026.
Agents as customers
The x402 payments, MCP server and Circle integration all point the same way: Venice expects software agents, not only people, to be buyers of inference, and wants to be the easiest place for them to pay.
Verifiable privacy
TEE and E2EE models arrived in 2026 for a limited set of text models. Widening that to more models, and to images and tools, would move Venice's privacy promise from trust towards proof.
Things to watch
Mid-2027. The Series A token grant and warrants begin vesting after their one-year lock.
Early 2027. The team's original 24-month token stream completes.
Burn versus issuance. Whether monthly burns in tokens, not dollars, approach the roughly 167,000 VVV now issued each month.
Regulation. Rules on AI content, on age verification and on tokens could each change what Venice is allowed to offer.
Independent audits. Whether Venice publishes third-party verification of its no-logging claims for the default Private mode.
Venice compared with its rivals
Venice sits between two worlds. As an app it competes with ChatGPT and model routers. As a token it gets grouped with decentralised AI networks that work very differently. A fair comparison needs both.
| Project | What it is | Who runs it | What the token does | Privacy approach | Main caveat |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Venice (VVV) | AI app and API that relays to hosted open models and outside frontier models | A single company | Stake to earn emissions and mint DIEM compute credits; revenue-funded burns | Local history, no-log proxy, optional TEE and E2EE | One company controls everything; no holder rights |
| Bittensor (TAO) | A network of competing AI 'subnets' rewarded by token emissions | Decentralised validators and miners | Pays miners and validators; staked to subnets | Depends on each subnet | Complex incentives; quality varies by subnet |
| Render (RENDER) | A marketplace for GPU power, first for 3D rendering and now for AI jobs | Network of node operators plus a foundation | Pays for GPU work under a burn-and-mint model | Not a privacy product | Demand tied to creative and compute cycles |
| Akash (AKT) | An open marketplace for renting cloud servers and GPUs | Decentralised providers | Pays for leases; staked to secure the chain | You run your own model, so privacy is in your hands | Needs technical skill; no consumer app |
| NEAR AI (NEAR) | Confidential AI cloud built on secure enclaves, linked to NEAR Protocol | NEAR ecosystem organisations | NEAR is the base chain's coin, not a compute voucher | Hardware enclaves by design | Earlier-stage consumer product. Venice uses NEAR AI Cloud as a TEE provider |
| Morpheus (MOR) | An open network for personal AI agents | Community of contributors | Rewards compute, code and capital providers | Aims for local, user-owned agents | Early; Venice's 2024 launch was linked to it |
| OpenRouter (no token) | A unified API that routes requests to hundreds of models | A private company | None. Pay in dollars per token | Per-provider data policies you can filter | A conventional company without a privacy mission |
| ChatGPT (no token) | The mainstream AI assistant from OpenAI | OpenAI | None. Monthly subscription | Conversations stored on company servers, with controls | The thing Venice defines itself against |
How to read this table
The most important column is "who runs it". Bittensor, Render and Akash are networks in which many independent operators supply work and the token pays them. Venice is a company that buys compute and resells it, with a token layered on top as a way of reserving capacity. That makes Venice simpler and, so far, much better at producing a polished consumer product and real revenue. It also means the token's value rests on one firm's decisions instead of on a protocol's rules.
Against the non-token rivals the comparison flips. OpenRouter and ChatGPT are conventional businesses, and so is Venice. What Venice adds is the privacy architecture, the lighter filtering, and the option of paying for compute by holding an asset rather than by spending money.
Market-size rankings shift weekly. In September 2026 Crypto Briefing's headline placed Venice third among crypto AI platforms by market value while its text cited a Messari ranking of second, which shows how loose these league tables are.
Wallets for VVV and DIEM
VVV and DIEM are standard tokens on Base, so any wallet that handles Ethereum-style networks will hold them. The choice is about how much convenience you trade for safety.
Coinbase Wallet / Base app
Self-custody wallet from the company that built Base. Base is a default network, so VVV and DIEM show up without manual setup.
MetaMask
The most widely used Ethereum-style wallet. Base can be added in a click. Works with Venice's staking page.
Rabby
A browser wallet that previews what each transaction will do before you sign, which helps avoid mistakes when staking or minting.
Rainbow
A friendly Ethereum and Base wallet with clear token displays.
Ledger
A hardware device that keeps keys offline. Use it through MetaMask or Rabby to hold VVV on Base and sign staking transactions.
Trezor
Open-source hardware wallet. Connects to Base through MetaMask or Rabby.
Safe
A smart-contract wallet that needs several signatures. Used by teams and treasuries on Base.
Phantom
Started on Solana and now supports Base too. Useful if you hold the Solana version of VVV. Staking for DIEM happens on Base.
Exchange account
Leaving VVV on Coinbase, Upbit or KuCoin is simple, but the exchange holds the keys and you cannot stake with Venice or mint DIEM from there.
Three rules that prevent most losses
Write down the recovery phrase on paper and never type it into a website, a chat or a screenshot. Nobody from Venice, an exchange or a wallet company will ever need it.
Check the network. VVV on Base and VVV on Solana are different tokens at different addresses. Sending Base tokens to a Solana address, or withdrawing from an exchange on the wrong network, can lose them.
Keep a little ETH on Base to pay transaction fees. Fees on Base are usually a few cents, but you cannot move tokens with a zero balance.
Wallet features change. We have described each product in general terms and have not tested every combination. This is not an endorsement of any wallet.
Where and how to buy VVV
This section explains the mechanics for readers who have already decided. It is not a suggestion that you should buy. You can use Venice fully without owning any token.
Pick a regulated exchange that serves your country
Coinbase has listed VVV since launch day in January 2025. Upbit serves South Korea. KuCoin and others list it too. Availability differs by country and changes over time.
Open and verify an account
Expect to show identity documents. Turn on two-factor authentication with an authenticator app, not text messages.
Deposit money
Bank transfer is usually cheapest. Card purchases are faster and cost more.
Find the VVV market and check the name
Confirm you are looking at Venice Token, ticker VVV. Compare the price with CoinGecko so you know you are on the real market.
Place an order
A market order fills at once at the going price. A limit order waits for the price you set. VVV can move several per cent in minutes.
Decide where to keep it
You can leave it on the exchange, which is simple but means the exchange holds it for you. To stake or mint DIEM you must withdraw to your own wallet on the Base network.
Set up a self-custody wallet
See the wallets section. Store the recovery phrase offline.
Get ETH or USDC onto Base
Withdraw directly to Base from an exchange that supports it, or use a bridge. Keep some ETH for fees.
Open a decentralised exchange
Aerodrome is the main venue for VVV and DIEM on Base. Type the address yourself or use a bookmark. Fake sites buy adverts in search results.
Paste the official token address
Do not search by ticker alone. Use the VVV contract address published by Venice and shown in our tokenomics section, and check it character by character.
Review the swap
Look at the price impact and the minimum you will receive. Large orders in thin pools get poor prices.
Confirm in your wallet
Read what the wallet says you are approving. The tokens arrive in the same wallet within seconds.
Hold VVV in your own wallet on Base
Exchange balances cannot be staked with Venice.
Go to Venice's token page
Venice directs users to venice.ai/token for staking. Connect your wallet there, not on a link someone sent you.
Stake VVV to receive sVVV
From this point you earn a share of emissions. Remember the seven-day cooldown if you later want out.
Optional: lock sVVV to mint DIEM
The page shows the current mint rate. Locked sVVV earns 80% of the normal yield. Note exactly how many DIEM you minted, because you must burn that amount to unlock.
Optional: stake DIEM for API credit
Each staked DIEM gives $1 a day of credit to the linked Venice account. A minimum of 0.1 DIEM applies. Credit that is not used that day does not roll over.
Or simply buy DIEM
If you only want compute, DIEM can be bought on Aerodrome and staked, with no VVV involved. Compare the market price with what the same dollars would buy as ordinary API credit before you do.
Risks and criticisms
A guide that only repeated the company's case would be an advert. These are the strongest objections we found, set out plainly, with Venice's reply where it has given one.
Token holders own nothing
VVV carries no claim on Venice's revenue, assets or treasury and no vote. The Spartan Group's otherwise favourable report said that after the Series A the token is secondary to the equity in every respect, and that revenue reaches VVV only when the company chooses to send it. Ethereum researcher Dankrad Feist criticised the arrangement bluntly, pointing out that shareholders have legal protections while token holders rely on Venice continuing its burns. Venice's reply is that it funded growth by selling shares so that it would not have to sell tokens, and that a company with better margins can burn more.
Everything can be changed by the company
The emission rate, the DIEM target, the mint curve, the yield split and the burn budget are all set by Venice. They changed more than ten times in under two years. So far most changes have favoured holders. Nothing obliges that to continue, and a community newsletter noted there is no on-chain governance or time lock behind these settings.
A large treasury overhang
Venice holds more than 30 million VVV, over a third of total supply. The company says it has not sold. The Series A warrants and grant will release up to 6.5 million from that treasury from mid-2027. Circulating supply could rise a great deal without a single new token being issued.
"Deflationary" is a goal, not a fact
Burns are sized in dollars and have been far smaller than issuance in token terms. Alea Research calculated in April 2026 that buybacks would need to grow roughly twenty-fold to match emissions at that time. Emission cuts have since done much of the work, but the token burned count fell through the first half of 2026 as the price rose.
Default privacy rests on trust
In the default Private mode, the promise that prompts are not stored is enforced by policy and contract. The machine running the model sees your text. An industry analysis by Airframe noted the absence of public SOC 2 or ISO certifications and called for a published threat model and independent audits. Only the TEE and E2EE modes offer hardware-backed assurance, on a limited set of models and with features switched off.
Anonymous is not private
When you use a GPT, Claude or Gemini model through Venice, that provider receives your prompt and Venice says you should assume they keep it. Your identity is hidden, but anything identifying that you type into the prompt is not.
Fewer filters, more abuse
In May 2025 security firm Certo reported that Venice was being recommended on hacking forums and that in its tests the service produced phishing messages, ransomware code and Android spyware. The report we read carried no response from Venice. The company says it maintains safeguards against illegal use. The broader point stands: a tool built to refuse less will be used for things most people would want refused, and that invites regulatory and reputational trouble.
Two kinds of legal exposure
Venice sells lightly filtered AI at a time when governments are writing rules on AI safety, deepfakes and age checks. It also issues a token, in a country where its founder has twice settled with the securities regulator over earlier ventures. Either front could force changes to the product or the token.
A reseller in a price war
Venice trains no models. It rents chips and resells other people's models at a margin that Spartan estimated at around 20% on the API. Larger rivals can cut prices, model makers can change their terms, and the open models Venice relies on could fall behind closed ones. Building its own data centres answers part of this and adds heavy fixed costs.
Self-reported numbers
User counts, revenue run rate and profitability all come from the company and have not been audited in public. Even friendly sources conflict: Spartan's report cited both $70 million and more than $100 million in different sections. Critics on an Alea Research podcast argued that most users are on the free tier and that on-chain activity is small beside the headline figures.
DIEM traps and cooldowns
If you mint DIEM and sell it, you must buy the same amount back to unlock your sVVV, at whatever it costs then. Unstaking VVV takes seven days. DIEM's promise of $1 a day "forever" is a company commitment that depends on Venice surviving and honouring it, and on its pricing: if Venice raises model prices, a dollar of credit buys less.
Violent price swings
VVV traded near $3 in March 2025, fell below $1 at its low according to CoinGecko, and reached about $34 in September 2026 before dropping by a third within weeks. Reports of the reaction to the Series A differ, with one outlet noting a rise on the day and another a fall of nearly half from the prior peak. Anyone holding VVV should expect moves of this size.
Team sale and suspicious trading at launch
The team sold 1% of supply on launch day, later buying back and burning an equivalent amount. The Block reported that two liquidity contributors on Aerodrome were suspended after an investigation into suspicious trading around the launch. Both episodes were disclosed, and both are part of the record.
Reliability complaints
Airframe's June 2026 review collected user reports of outages, login failures, lost context in long chats, difficulty cancelling subscriptions and a poor aggregate rating on Trustpilot. Storing history only in the browser also means it can vanish with a cleared cache.
Smart-contract and bridge risk
Staking and DIEM contracts hold a large share of supply. Venice cites an audit, and audits reduce risk without removing it. The Solana version of VVV adds dependence on a cross-chain gateway. Copycat tokens using the VVV ticker are a known hazard.
Key-person dependence
Venice's public identity is closely tied to Erik Voorhees. His reputation attracts users and investors, and any legal or personal trouble for him would land on the company and the token.
Myths vs facts
Venice attracts strong opinions from fans and detractors alike. Twelve common claims, checked against the record.
VVV is a share in Venice.
It is not. Shares belong to the founders, staff and Series A investors. VVV gives no ownership, dividends or votes. Its links to the business are utility and company-funded burns.
You need VVV to use Venice.
No. There is a free tier, card subscriptions and dollar-priced API credit. The large majority of users never hold the token.
Venice is a decentralised AI network.
Venice is a centralised company that rents and resells compute. Its launch drew on the decentralised Morpheus project and it uses outside GPU providers, but there is no open network of miners or validators and no governance by token holders.
Nobody can ever see what I type.
Only in E2EE mode is that close to true. In Private mode the GPU processes plain text under a no-retention promise. In Anonymous mode the outside provider sees and may store the prompt.
Uncensored means anything goes.
Filters are lighter, not absent. Venice says it keeps safeguards against abuse and illegal activity, third-party models keep their own rules, and users report refusals.
VVV has a fixed supply of 100 million.
100 million was the starting figure. A third was burned, and tokens have been issued and burned since. The total was about 81 million in October 2026 and there is no hard cap.
VVV is already deflationary.
Venice aims for that. To date, tokens issued have exceeded tokens burned in most periods. The balance depends on revenue, the burn budget and the token price.
One DIEM is worth one dollar.
One staked DIEM yields one dollar of credit per day. The token itself has traded for hundreds of dollars to more than a thousand, because it represents a stream of daily credit.
DIEM credit piles up if I don't use it.
It refreshes each day. Credit not used that day is gone. DIEM suits steady, predictable usage.
Venice builds its own AI models.
It hosts open-source models and relays to closed ones. Its work is in the product, the routing and the privacy plumbing.
The Series A investors bought VVV.
They bought 8.98% of the company's equity. A token grant and warrants were attached, locked for a year and vesting over three more.
Staking yield is paid from Venice's profits.
It is paid in newly created VVV. That is dilution shared out among stakers, and the rate has fallen with each emission cut.
Glossary
Every piece of jargon used on this page, in one or two plain sentences. Type to search.
- Aerodrome
- The largest decentralised exchange on Base. It hosts the main on-chain pools for VVV and DIEM.
- Agent
- Software that uses an AI model to take actions by itself, such as calling APIs or paying for services.
- Airdrop
- A free distribution of tokens. Half of the original VVV supply was set aside for one.
- Anonymous mode
- Venice's label for models run by outside companies such as OpenAI or Anthropic. The provider sees your prompt but not who you are.
- API
- Application programming interface. A way for software, rather than a person, to send prompts to Venice.
- ARR
- Annualised run-rate revenue. Recent revenue multiplied up to a year. It is not profit and not a forecast.
- Attestation
- A cryptographic receipt from a secure chip proving which software it is running.
- Base
- An Ethereum layer-2 network built by Coinbase. VVV and DIEM were issued here.
- Burn
- Sending tokens to an address nobody controls so that they leave the supply for good.
- Buyback
- Using company money to buy tokens on the open market. Venice burns what it buys.
- Cooldown
- The seven-day wait between asking to unstake VVV and being able to move it.
- DIEM
- A token on Base. Each one staked gives $1 of Venice API credit per day. Minted only by locking sVVV.
- E2EE
- End-to-end encryption. On Venice the prompt is encrypted on your device and only opened inside a secure enclave.
- Emissions
- Newly created VVV, paid out to stakers. Two million a year from October 2026.
- Equity
- Ownership shares in Venice the company. Separate from VVV, which carries no ownership rights.
- ERC-20
- The standard format for tokens on Ethereum and networks compatible with it, such as Base.
- FDV
- Fully diluted valuation. Token price multiplied by total supply, including tokens not yet circulating.
- Frontier model
- One of the most capable AI models of the day, usually closed and run by its maker.
- GPU
- Graphics processing unit. The chip that AI models run on.
- Inference
- Running a trained AI model to get an answer. This is what Venice sells.
- Layer 2
- A network that processes transactions cheaply and settles them on Ethereum.
- Mint rate
- How much sVVV must be locked to create one DIEM. It rises steeply as DIEM supply nears its target.
- Open-source model
- An AI model whose weights are published so that anyone can run it.
- Private mode
- Venice's default. Prompts run on Venice-controlled GPUs or partners that promise by contract not to keep data.
- Pro
- Venice's entry paid plan, $18 a month in 2026.
- Prompt
- The text or image you send to an AI model.
- Proxy
- A relay in the middle. Venice's proxy passes prompts to GPUs without, it says, storing them.
- Staking
- Depositing VVV in Venice's contract. It earns emissions and is the first step to minting DIEM.
- sVVV
- Staked VVV. The receipt-like balance you hold while your VVV is staked.
- System prompt
- Hidden instructions placed before a conversation that shape how a model behaves.
- TEE
- Trusted execution environment. A sealed area of a chip whose contents the machine's operator cannot read.
- TGE
- Token generation event. For VVV, 27 January 2025.
- Uncensored
- Venice's term for models with few content filters. It does not mean no rules at all.
- Utilization rate
- The original measure of API demand that split emissions between stakers and Venice. Retired in August 2025.
- VVV
- The Venice token. Staked for yield, plan perks and the right to mint DIEM.
- Warrant
- A right to buy something later at a set price. Series A investors hold warrants over 5 million VVV.
- x402
- An open standard for paying for web requests with stablecoins. Venice's API supports it.
- Zero data retention
- A provider's promise not to keep prompts or outputs after answering.
Test yourself: the Venice quiz
Thirteen questions. No tricks, and every answer is somewhere on this page.
Frequently asked questions
Short, direct answers to the questions people ask most.
What is Venice AI in simple terms?
Venice is an AI app and developer API, similar in use to ChatGPT, built around two promises: it does not store your conversations on its servers, and it applies far fewer content filters. It offers chat, image, video, audio and coding tools using more than 200 models.
What is the VVV token?
VVV is Venice's token, issued on the Base network in January 2025. People stake it to earn newly issued VVV, to unlock plan perks and to mint DIEM, a second token that turns into daily API credit. VVV is not a share in the company.
What is DIEM and how is it different from VVV?
DIEM is a token that gives $1 of Venice API credit per day for each one staked. It can only be created by locking staked VVV, and it can be traded. VVV is the capital asset you stake. DIEM is the compute voucher that comes out of it.
Who founded Venice?
Erik Voorhees, best known as the founder of the ShapeShift exchange, is the founder and chief executive. Jesse Proudman, a Seattle entrepreneur who previously sold companies to IBM and Betterment, is co-founder, president and chief technology officer.
Is Venice really private?
It depends on the mode. Chat history stays on your device in every mode. In the default Private mode you are trusting Venice and its GPU partners not to keep prompts. In TEE and E2EE modes hardware enclaves enforce it. In Anonymous mode an outside provider such as OpenAI sees your prompt, though not your identity.
Is Venice really uncensored?
Less filtered, not unfiltered. Venice runs open models with few restrictions and lets adults switch off safe mode, but the company says it keeps some safeguards against abuse and illegal activity, and some users report refusals.
What is the total supply of VVV?
There is no fixed cap. 100 million were created in January 2025, about 33.5 million were burned in March 2025, and new tokens have been issued to stakers since. CoinGecko showed a total supply of about 81 million and a circulating supply of about 48 million in October 2026.
How much new VVV is created each year?
About 2 million a year from 1 October 2026, down from about 14 million a year at launch. All of it goes to stakers. Venice has changed this number many times and can change it again.
How does Venice burn VVV?
In three ways described by the company and analysts: a discretionary monthly buy-and-burn funded from revenue, a fixed amount burned for each new paid subscription, and, since July 2026, $5 of VVV bought and burned for every $100 of API credit sold.
Do VVV holders own part of Venice?
No. Ownership sits with shareholders, including the Series A investors who bought 8.98% of the company in July 2026. VVV holders have no claim on profits or assets and no vote. Their link to the business is the utility of staking and the burns the company chooses to fund.
Where can I buy VVV?
On centralised exchanges including Coinbase, Upbit and KuCoin, and on decentralised exchanges such as Aerodrome on Base and Raydium on Solana. Always check the contract address against Venice's official pages, because copycat tokens exist.
Can I use Venice without any crypto?
Yes. Most people use the free tier or pay for Pro with a card. The API can be paid for with dollar credits. The tokens are an optional route to compute, aimed mainly at developers and agents.
What is sVVV?
sVVV is staked VVV. When you deposit VVV in the staking contract you hold sVVV, which earns emissions. Locking sVVV is how DIEM is minted. Getting back to liquid VVV takes a seven-day cooldown.
Is VVV a good investment?
This site does not give investment advice or forecasts. VVV is a volatile token whose value depends on choices made by one private company. The risks section sets out what could go wrong. Speak to a qualified adviser before making financial decisions.
Sources and further reading
Everything on this page was checked against the sources below in October 2026. Company pages are primary sources for how things are meant to work. News reports and independent research supply the figures and the criticism. Where they disagree we have said so.
- Venice: Introducing the Venice Token, VVV (27 Jan 2025)
- Venice: Introducing DIEM as tokenized intelligence (20 Aug 2025)
- Venice: DIEM overview page
- Venice: Privacy architecture and the four privacy modes
- Venice docs: TEE and E2EE models
- Venice docs: API pricing
- Venice help centre: Is the supply capped for VVV?
- Venice help centre: Why has the VVV total supply changed?
- Venice help centre: Inflation and staking model after DIEM
- Venice help centre: VVV tokenomics
- Venice changelog, 6 to 25 May 2026
- CoinGecko: Venice Token (VVV) market data
- The Block: Venice airdrop ends with $100 million in unclaimed VVV burned (12 Mar 2025)
- The Block: Venice AI raises $65 million Series A at $1 billion equity valuation (1 Jul 2026)
- GeekWire: Venice AI raises $65M (1 Jul 2026)
- GeekWire: Seattle tech vet joins Venice (12 Mar 2025)
- Decrypt: Why ShapeShift founder Erik Voorhees is pivoting to a privacy-centric AI startup (11 May 2024)
- Decrypt: Venice AI raises $65 million (Jul 2026)
- CryptoSlate: Venice's $65M raise makes VVV holders ask how much growth reaches the token (2 Jul 2026)
- The Defiant: Voorhees defends Venice token terms (2 Jul 2026)
- The Defiant: Venice AI launches VVV token (28 Jan 2025)
- Alea Research: VVV memo (6 Apr 2026)
- Alea Research, The Breakdown digest: Venice is now a crypto AI unicorn (6 Jul 2026)
- The Spartan Group: Venice, the Gateway to Intelligence (19 Aug 2026)
- Own Your Mind newsletter: Minting DIEM is about to get cheaper (Aug 2026)
- Invezz: VVV and Venice's $100 million revenue (18 Aug 2026)
- Crypto Briefing: Venice becomes third largest crypto AI platform (21 Sep 2026)
- Crypto Briefing: Venice cuts annual VVV emissions to 2 million (1 Oct 2026)
- Crypto Briefing: Venice brings VVV to Solana through Sunrise (6 Oct 2026)
- KuCoin News / BlockBeats: Venice tokenomics update (17 Jul 2026)
- OneKey: Upbit to list VVV (12 May 2026)
- Infosecurity Magazine: Uncensored AI tool raises cybersecurity alarms (20 May 2025)
- Certo: Hackers embrace unrestricted chatbot Venice.ai
- Airframe: Venice AI product analysis (14 Jun 2026)
- Wikipedia: Erik Voorhees
- Venice Stats (community dashboard)
- BaseScan: VVV token contract
More plain-English guides
Part of The Coin Galaxy. Venice touches several of these directly: it runs on a layer above Ethereum, uses NEAR's confidential cloud, and is most often compared with Bittensor and Render.