I want to tell you about something I stumbled back into this week that I can't stop thinking about.
Someone mentioned Venice AI to me a while back — one of those passing references that files itself away in the back of your brain. I didn't do much with it at the time. Then a couple days ago I was scanning charts, saw VVV moving, and thought: wait, that's the Venice token. Let me look at this again.
So I started digging. And the more I dug, the more surprised I got. Not because the token was up — tokens go up and down all day. What surprised me was the gap between what this thing actually is and how little attention it's getting. The founder's reputation. The product. The revenue. The way the tokenomics work. How cleanly it maps onto every narrative dominating crypto and AI right now. And then I went looking for discussion — Crypto Twitter, Reddit, Telegram, social trackers — and found almost nothing. A couple hundred tweets. A handful of accounts talking about it. No viral threads. No influencer campaigns. A token doubling in a week with essentially no social footprint.
VVV went from $1.77 to over $3.60 in a matter of days. Volume surged past $36 million in a single session. A crypto analyst called AltsDaddy posted a chart showing it just shattered a descending channel it had been stuck in for weeks.
Something is moving this and it's not hype, because there is no hype. Here's what I found.
Venice AI is a generative AI platform — text, image, code, video — and at first glance it looks like another ChatGPT clone. It's not. It was built from scratch by Erik Voorhees, one of the oldest names in Bitcoin (he's been in it since 2011, built SatoshiDice when it was processing half of all Bitcoin transactions, then built ShapeShift), and the entire architecture is organized around a single obsession: making it so that Venice itself cannot see what you're doing with it.
Your conversations live in your browser. Venice's servers never touch them. When you send a prompt, it goes through an encrypted proxy that strips your IP, your identity, everything — then the naked, anonymous prompt gets routed to a GPU that processes it and purges it. The GPU sees your words but has no idea who you are. Venice doesn't know what you asked. Nobody does.
It has 1.3 million users. Over a million API calls a day. It recently plugged in GPT-5.2, Claude Opus 4.5, and Gemini 3 Pro alongside its open-source models. It generates roughly $4 million a month in revenue. And it has never taken a dollar of venture capital — Voorhees self-funded the entire thing.
That last part matters because it means there's no VC unlock schedule hanging over the token. No investors waiting to dump. Just a founder who bet his own money and aligned himself entirely with the token's performance.
I'll get to the risks — and they're real — but first I need to explain what VVV actually does, because this is where it gets interesting.
When you stake VVV, you don't earn governance rights (Voorhees has been blunt: "the token is not for governance"). You don't earn fees. What you earn is a pro-rata share of Venice's total AI compute capacity, every day, forever.
Venice measures this capacity in units called DIEM. The network currently produces 18,148 DIEM per day — think of that as the total throughput of every GPU in Venice's fleet, expressed as a standardized unit where 1 DIEM equals $1 worth of API calls. Stake 1% of the active VVV supply, and you get 1% of that daily output. You don't spend the VVV. You hold it and draw compute whenever you want.
I had to sit with this for a minute to understand why it matters.
Every other AI platform charges you per token, per request, per generation. The meter is always running. OpenAI charges you. Anthropic charges you. Google charges you. You consume the AI and it's gone, like burning gasoline.
VVV works more like owning a share of the refinery. You don't buy gasoline. You own a slice of production, and every day your slice refills. And here's the part that's actually clever: as GPUs get cheaper and models get more efficient, Venice's total capacity (that 18,148 number) grows. Your same stake produces more compute over time. Venice's own blog says it explicitly — VVV "is not only shielded from the deflationary effect of computing advancements, but benefits from it."
In traditional SaaS, technology getting better means prices fall and your subscription buys the same thing for less. With VVV, technology getting better means your fixed stake buys more. The incentives are inverted and they run in your favor.
Recently, Venice optimized how they allocate capacity — dividing it among active users instead of all stakers — and this single change created a 14x increase in DIEM per token for people actually using the API. That's not a marketing claim. It's a mathematical consequence of denominator compression.
I kept thinking about this mechanism and then I remembered something Sam Altman said.
On the Lex Fridman podcast: "Compute is going to be the currency of the future. Maybe the most precious commodity in the world."
On the All-In podcast, he went further. He proposed something called Universal Basic Compute — the idea that instead of handing people money in a post-AGI world, you give everyone a slice of AI inference. "What you get is not dollars, but you own part of the productivity." You could use your slice, sell it, or donate it. "I wonder if the future looks something more like Universal Basic Compute than Universal Basic Income, and everybody gets like a slice of GPT-7 compute."
I read that quote, and then I looked at what VVV literally does, and I felt the hair on my arms stand up.
VVV is tokenized AI compute. When you stake it, you own a perpetual, pro-rata share of an AI inference pipeline. You can use it yourself, an agent can use it autonomously, or you can sell the capacity on the secondary market. The allocation grows as the underlying infrastructure expands. You don't spend the principal — you hold it and draw from it.
Altman described the theory. Voorhees built the thing.
Now — Venice is not OpenAI. It has 1.3 million users, not hundreds of millions. The comparison in scale is absurd. But the mechanism is identical to what the CEO of the most valuable AI company on earth says the future looks like. And VVV is, today, the only liquid token on any exchange that represents a direct, perpetual, growing claim on AI compute.
In a world where compute is the new oil, this is a tokenized share of a refinery. And it's trading at a $160 million market cap.
Now I need to talk about Zcash, because what happened with ZEC is the single most relevant precedent for what might happen to VVV.
ZEC went from under $40 in September 2025 to $744 by November 7th. That's a 1,500%+ move in about two months. The narrative was simple: privacy matters. As blockchain analytics firms made every Bitcoin transaction traceable, as governments rolled out CBDCs, as financial surveillance became the default — a token that could hide your transactions became existentially valuable. They called it "Privacy Summer."
Just yesterday — literally February 14th, 2026 — Barry Silbert, the CEO of Digital Currency Group (which owns Grayscale), stood up at Bitcoin Investor Week in New York and called privacy coins "the next asymmetric bet" with 100x to 1,000x upside potential. His math: if just 5-10% of Bitcoin's $1.3 trillion market cap rotated into privacy assets, that's $65-130 billion flooding a sector currently worth a fraction of that.
ZEC now sits at a $3.9 billion market cap despite doing exactly one thing: private transactions. No product. No API. No revenue beyond mining rewards. No AI. No agent economy. No compute marketplace. Just private money transfers.
VVV does private AI.
Think about what that means for a second. ZEC proved that the market will aggressively reprice privacy when the narrative catches. But ZEC's privacy applies to payments — a use case that, while important, is relatively narrow. VVV's privacy applies to thinking — to every question you ask an AI, every image you generate, every piece of code you write, every research query you run. As AI becomes the interface through which people interact with all knowledge, private AI isn't a niche concern. It's the entire game.
And VVV sits at roughly 1/25th of ZEC's market cap while also having AI exposure, tokenized compute mechanics, real product revenue, and structural supply compression that ZEC doesn't have.
I searched for anyone making this comparison on Crypto Twitter. I found essentially nobody. The AltsDaddy chart post. A handful of price alerts. That's it.
Let me explain who actually pays for all this, because the economics need to make sense or nothing else matters.
Venice has three revenue streams. Pro subscriptions at $18 a month give you unlimited text, a thousand images a day, access to frontier models — payable in USD, Bitcoin, or through Coinbase. Developer API credits can be bought directly with dollars or crypto, priced per million tokens just like OpenAI or Anthropic. And DIEM holders get $1/day per DIEM of API allocation that resets at midnight UTC — they prepaid by locking VVV, so the economic capture happened at token acquisition.
All three streams feed the same engine: a portion of that revenue goes to buying VVV on the open market and burning it permanently. Every Pro subscriber, every developer buying credits, every agent consuming compute — they're all contributing to a monthly bonfire of supply. This started November 2025. The first confirmed burn was December 10th. It's been happening monthly since.
At $4 million a month in revenue, the math works out to roughly 1.5 million VVV burned annually. Against 6 million in new emissions, that's still net inflationary — burns only offset about 25% of new supply right now. Venice needs roughly 4x its current burn rate to hit net deflation. That's around $15-16 million in monthly revenue. It's not there yet.
But the direction is the thing. Emissions have been cut 40% in twelve months (from 10 million per year at launch to 6 million as of February 10th). Burns are growing with revenue. The gap is closing. And if you believe AI adoption is an escalator not a rollercoaster — which seems reasonable given what every major tech company on earth is doing right now — the trajectory favors deflation.
I want to walk through the supply mechanics, because they're doing something unusual and it explains why a 100% move can happen on zero chatter.
One third of the genesis supply — 32.6 million tokens out of 100 million — went unclaimed during the airdrop and was permanently burned. Another million were re-bought and burned by the team. Before the token was three months old, 33.6 million VVV ceased to exist.
Then there's the DIEM lock. You can only mint DIEM (the perpetual $1/day compute token) by locking staked VVV as collateral. Right now, over 6.3 million VVV are locked this way — roughly 15% of circulating supply, removed from liquid markets. DIEM staking surged about 22% and compute usage rose approximately 79% over one recent two-week period. As AI usage grows, more DIEM is needed, more VVV gets locked.
Circulating supply is around 43 million. But subtract the DIEM locks, subtract the staked VVV earning yield, and the actual liquid float — the tokens that could hit an order book tomorrow — is considerably smaller. When demand hits a thin float, you get the kind of move we're watching right now.
Now the uncomfortable part. I'm going to give this to you straight because the risks are what make the setup interesting — if they weren't here, the token wouldn't be this cheap.
I pulled up the VVV smart contract on BaseScan and found this: function mint(address to, uint256 amount) external onlyOwner. The team can create unlimited VVV at any time. The emission schedule — the whole deflationary trajectory I just described — is a social promise, not a code constraint. CoinGecko's GoPlus scanner flags it explicitly. If you own VVV, you are trusting Voorhees not to dilute you. There's no on-chain mechanism preventing it.
The launch was ugly. Aerodrome insiders bought VVV before the public announcement — $50K into $1M in under an hour. Team-linked wallets received tokens four days pre-launch. Team members sold 1% of supply on day one. After public backlash, Venice re-bought and burned those tokens. VVV still cratered 88% from its all-time high of $22.58 to $0.92 by November. Bitget reported that Binance perpetual futures listings became a "death trap" enabling aggressive shorting. The stain is real.
There's no governance. No DAO. No token holder votes. Voorhees is CEO, sole investor, largest holder. His word is the only constraint.
The privacy claims are unaudited. Venice says verification is a priority. Today, you're trusting the description.
Venice doesn't train models. It routes to them. If OpenAI, Anthropic, or Google restrict API access, the offering shrinks. The moat is privacy plus tokenomics, not the model layer.
These risks are real and I'm not minimizing them. But I also want to be honest about what they imply about the price: VVV at $160 million market cap, for a platform doing $50 million in annualized revenue with 1.3 million users, listed on Coinbase, at the intersection of three dominant narratives — that's not a valuation reflecting optimism. That's a valuation reflecting a market that has already priced in maximum skepticism.
The thing I keep circling back to is the convergence.
Render Network: $3 billion+, GPU marketplace, no consumer AI product, no privacy. Bittensor: $3 billion+, decentralized ML, no consumer app, no revenue. Fetch.ai: $2 billion+, AI agent framework, mostly speculative. Zcash: $3.9 billion, private payments, one feature, no product revenue. Venice: $160 million.
And then there's the coiled spring underneath the whole position. ETH is at roughly $2,000 — down over 50% from its all-time high, six consecutive red months, Bloomberg reporting its lowest level since last April. VVV lives on Base, Coinbase's L2. Its deepest liquidity is the VVV/ETH pair on Aerodrome. Most of its volume flows through ETH-denominated pairs.
In crypto bull markets, capital cascades: BTC first, then ETH, then L2 ecosystem tokens, then small-cap plays on hot L2s. VVV sits at the very end of that amplification chain. ETH doesn't even need to do anything dramatic — a return to its prior all-time high is a 2x, and small-cap tokens on an L2 during a bull cycle routinely do 3-5x the base layer's move.
VVV was also the first token in history to airdrop directly to AI agents — 25% of its genesis supply went to protocol accounts for Virtuals, Luna, aixbt, VaderAI, and Coinbase AgentKit developers. Venice has no KYC, uses the OpenAI API spec (so any agent built for OpenAI works with Venice), and charges zero per request when you stake. Voorhees has framed it simply: if you had to pay for every email in the 90s, email wouldn't have taken off. Venice brings the cost of inference for agents to zero.
So you have: the privacy narrative (proven by ZEC's 1,500% run), the AI narrative (proven by every valuation in tech for the past two years), the tokenized compute narrative (described by Altman, built by Venice), the ETH recovery trade (coiled at 2-year lows), and the agent economy (nascent but structurally inevitable) — all converging on a single $160 million token that barely registers on social media and that almost nobody in crypto seems to be discussing.
Either this is the most convergent setup in crypto right now, or the risks I described above are being correctly priced as near-certainties, and the market is smarter than I am.
This is research, not financial advice. Crypto is volatile. You can lose everything. The author holds positions in assets discussed. Do your own work.
