Letter 102: Looking at the Venice AI ecosystem
Including a break down of how their VVV and DIEM tokens work
I’ve spoken about Venice AI before and mentioned their token VVV in my portfolio updates for a long time, including the addition of DIEM in my update last week.
Today I thought I would do a deeper dive into this ecosystem to share why I am so bullish on it, and how all their moving parts work together.
The more time I spend looking at and thinking about Venice, the more bullish I get. The tokenomics are genuinely interesting, the product is real, and the way they’ve structured their whole token ecosystem is creative. Not to mention it sits at the nexus of AI x Privacy x Crypto.
What is Venice AI
Venice is a privacy focused AI platform. You can use all the leading AI models through a single interface and API: Claude, GPT, Gemini, Llama, Mistral, and a bunch of open source models.
The privacy angle is one of the things that makes them different. They don’t store your prompts or responses. Zero data retention. Every time you use ChatGPT or Claude directly, that data sits on someone else’s servers. Venice routes your requests through decentralized GPU providers over encrypted connections. In other words: your data stays on your device.1
This matters more than you might think. AI regulation is tightening globally, companies are getting more careful about what data they feed into AI tools, and demand for private inference is only going up.
They also run uncensored models with no content filtering. For developers building apps that need full control over AI outputs, this is a significant selling point.
The platform processes over 1 million daily API requests. They have integrations with Brave (the privacy browser), OpenRouter, Cursor, VSCode, and a growing list of developer tools. I personally use their API, integrated with Yoshi (my openclaw AI agent) as a model gateway to access the best tools on the market for things like image and video generation.
Unlike many projects in crypto, with Venice, the product works. It has real users, including plenty from outside of crypto (via a standard subscription fee model).
In fact, Venice AI is even highlighted and recommended in the official OpenClaw docs. This is in spite of the fact that the founder OpenClaw is staunchly anti-crypto.
So, Venice AI is cool. But what about VVV and DIEM, and how do these tokens integrate into the ecosystem? We’ve seen a lot of good projects come and go in crypto and while having real users and revenue is fantastic, it doesn’t always translate into good things for their token price.
The VVV token
VVV is the core token of the Venice ecosystem. It lives on Base.
Some numbers:
Current price: ~$6.64
Market cap: ~$294M
Total supply: 78.8M tokens
42.7% of total supply has been burned (33.68M tokens, gone permanently)
31M tokens staked, 7.9M locked
Circulating supply: ~44M (and shrinking)
In March 2025, they burned all unclaimed airdrop tokens in one shot. Since November 2025, they’ve been using a portion of monthly revenue to buy VVV on the open market and burn it. Ongoing, revenue-funded buyback and burn.
You can stake your VVV to earn yield, currently around 18% APY. Emissions are set at 10M tokens per year, and 100% of those emissions go to stakers (note: there’s a 7-day unstaking period).
One thing to be clear about: the 18% yield comes from token emissions, not from platform revenue. That’s an important distinction. The buyback and burn is revenue-funded. The staking yield is inflationary. Both things can be true at the same time, and the idea is that the buybacks help offset the inflation rate. Well, the buybacks, and DIEM.
Where the real magic happens
In August 2025, Venice introduced DIEM. This is where the tokenomics get genuinely exciting.
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