Venice & Crypto's Escalating AI Ambitions

While Wall Street investors grappled with less certain American AI supremacy, Crypto hosted its own bit of AI news with the long-awaited expansion of crypto AI platform Venice.

First launched in May 2024, Venice aims to offer open, decentralized, generative AI without the data-logging or censorship prevalent in commercial platforms like ChatGPT. Yesterday, the platform surprised the market with the airdrop of its VVV token and API release, which arrived just as DeepSeek, the new, headline-grabbing AI out of China (which is also openly integrated into Venice), tightened its global access. All these forces have mixed to make Venice the talk of the town and worthy of a deeper dive.

So, today, we’ll explore the app – and examine its extensive functionality, as well as its token and API launch – to understand not only its abilities but also where it's headed!

What is Venice.AI?

Venice.AI is a chat-based platform for decentralized, private, and censorship-free access to generative AI. 

Founded by Erik Voorhees — best known for creating the ShapeShift exchange — Venice supports text, image, and code creation through a variety of open-source AI models (e.g., Nous, Llama 3, Playground 2.5). Unlike mainstream AI services that log every request and potentially share user data, Venice does not store conversation histories and instead routes encrypted queries through a decentralized network of GPU providers. Each GPU node sees only the immediate request, keeping personal information and broader user activity out of reach.

There have been critiques that Venice's decentralized approach ultimately provides fewer safeguards for users in knowing that their uploaded documents will be deleted when users don't know which bank of GPUs actually had their hands on sensitive data.

Nevertheless, some of these critiques are simply fundamental to DePIN and DeVIN, and on its side, Venice has sought to make privacy one of the platform's central sells, avoiding collection or permanent storage of sensitive information, only tracking certain events, like sign-ins or new chats, for product feedback.

The platform never logs the content of users’ prompts or the model responses.  Instead, the app relies on your browser’s local storage to record chats, meaning any conversations remain local to your device and are encrypted to prevent direct observation. For example, if you log onto Venice from a different device, your chat history will be blank because it was never synced to a central database.

What Are Its Features?

Beyond text, image, and code generation, Venice offers a suite of different features for users or developers to take advantage of.

Model Selection, Including DeepSeek

Across its generative features, Venice provides users with a series of different open-source models to choose from, like Llama 3.3, Qwen 2.5 Coder, and the newly infamous DeepSeek — a Chinese open-source AI project recognized for its cost-efficient training and competitive performance in coding, math, and logic. This particular support proves quite timely given that yesterday, DeepSeek restricted new sign-ups to phone numbers from China, though pro Venice users can still tap into the model, bypassing the current geographic hurdles.

Tiered Access

Venice offers three tiers of access to its platform, each designed around different needs and usage patterns.

If you simply want to explore Venice, you can do so without creating an account. In this mode, you can send up to 15 text prompts and 5 image prompts per day. For those seeking more prompts, there’s the “Private” tier, which provides 20 daily prompts and the opportunity to earn user points, which may have some tie-in to the tokens set aside for the Venice Incentive Fund.

Finally, the Pro Account caters to those wanting the full range of features or just easy access to DeepSeek. Priced at $18/month or $149/year, Pro grants unlimited text and image prompts, high-resolution outputs, and different model selections. Further, it also supports additional tools like Characters, which allow Pro users to create AI personas tailored to specific styles, contexts, or fields of expertise, or Venice’s new API, which enables integration into third-party apps and AI agents, such as ai16z’s Eliza. 

What is the VVV Token?

Notably not a governance token, Venice’s VVV is designed to grant stakers ongoing access to the app’s inference capacity at zero-marginal cost, effectively turning the need for payment-per-request into a straightforward stake-based model. Beyond that, here’s what you need to know about its distribution, functionality, and tokenomics.

Airdrop and Supply

Venice created a total of 100M VVV tokens at genesis, distributing 50% through an airdrop to its user base and a series of AI-centric projects, primarily on Base where the token is deployed. Holders of VIRTUALS, AERO, DEGEN, AIXBT, GAME, LUNA, VADER, CLANKER, MOR, and FOX, all qualified, based on a Dec. 31st snapshot. Additionally, registered Coinbase agent developers received an allocation, as will AI company Nous Research upon the launch of their upcoming PSYCHE token.  No presale took place. From the remaining amount, Venice the company retains 35% of the supply, part of which was unlocked at TGE, with the rest vested over time. The remaining supply is split between the Venice Incentive Fund, which receives 10% and likely ties into its still active points campaign, and liquidity development, which accounts for the final 5%. On top of this, 14M new tokens are minted each year — a 14% initial inflation rate — split between Venice and token stakers based on how heavily the API is used. 

Functionality and Incentives

At its core, VVV’s staking feature shifts Venice’s API from a pay-per-request setup to a stake-based model that delivers ongoing AI inference, whether that be text, image, or code. If you stake VVV, you get a proportional claim to Venice’s overall compute — so staking 1% of total VVV means you lock in 1% of the platform’s capacity indefinitely without having to spend tokens per request. You also earn rewards from token emissions distributed to stakers, so your net usage cost could drop below zero.

Of course, using Venice as a platform does not require staking. The free and Pro tiers remain the same, just as before. But for agent developers and anyone else with heavy needs, this model offers an easy alternative to per-call fees: once you stake, you can run as many requests as your share allows. And if Venice’s compute power expands on their backend, your staked portion naturally grows more valuable. Further, while it’s fueled by inflation, these emission rewards might help offset or exceed your costs, effectively paying you for using Venice’s API at points.

An Opportune Moment?

Whether by design or pure coincidence, Venice’s VVV token launch arrived just as DeepSeek restricted new global sign-ups to those with Chinese phone numbers. Having integrated DeepSeek only a few days before, Venice now finds itself uniquely positioned to offer access to the model through its newly live API.

Overall, by blending a privacy-focused architecture with open-source AI and strong ecosystem support, Venice’s public API launch arrives as a new, top contender to fuel AI agent development on Base. With an expanding suite of models, from Llama 3.3 to DeepSeek, and a token designed for indefinite access, Venice could very well breathe new life into Base as an AI hub amidst Virtuals cooling off. Whether this synergy will reshape the agent landscape or simply become a remarkable launch milestone remains to be seen, but the path forward for Venice is undoubtedly one to watch.