Original article | Odaily Odaily( @OdailyChina )
Author | Dingdang ( @XiaMiPP )
Last week, the founder of OpenClaw's advice to young people "not to waste time on cryptocurrencies" stung the crypto industry. This week, however, things took a subtle turn. OpenClaw's official documentation quietly listed Venice.ai, a crypto project with a native token, as a recommended model provider. And in the past month, the price of Venice's native token, VVV, rose from a low of around $1.50 to a high of around $8.40, a maximum increase of over 500%.
On one hand, there are calls to withdraw, and on the other hand, there are offers to be accepted. Why did OpenClaw push a project with a crypto token economic structure to the forefront?
Venice's background: A crypto OG, what will his AI endeavors look like?
To understand Venice, one must first understand the positioning of OpenClaw. It is an open-source, self-hosted AI agent platform that can integrate with chat software, becoming a 24/7 personal assistant for users, helping them send and receive emails, manage calendars, etc. However, OpenClaw itself does not provide AI Large Model (LLM) capabilities; it is merely an "execution and routing layer." True intelligence (thinking, planning, and generating responses) must come from external model providers .
Venice is a generative AI platform that emphasizes privacy and lack of censorship, positioning itself as a decentralized version of ChatGPT. The project launched in May 2024, but has not raised any funds or completed any VC rounds; it was entirely funded by founder Erik Voorhees.
Erik Voorhees is a veteran in the crypto industry, having entered the field in 2011. After the Mt. Gox crash in 2014, he founded ShapeShift, one of the earliest trading platforms emphasizing non-custodial and privacy-first principles. In 2021, he chose to hand over ShapeShift to DAO governance, completing its decentralized transformation. His career trajectory seems to revolve around "reducing reliance on centralized structures."
Another key figure in the team is Teana Baker-Taylor, with an impressive resume, having previously served as an executive at HSBC, Circle, Binance, and Crypto.com, responsible for operations and compliance. Most other members remain anonymous or maintain a low profile. Based on currently available data, the Venice team consists of approximately 20 people.
OpenClaw currently has 22 model providers, including large tech companies like Amazon, Anthropic, and Cloudflare. In terms of size and brand recognition, Venice is clearly not the most prominent, and could even be considered the least noticeable. However, it was once highlighted in the official documentation as a model provider with a native token economy. However, this highlighting may have been a mistake during document merging; it has since been removed, but Venice was already on OpenClaw's list of model providers some time ago.
However, why would OpenClaw choose such an inconspicuous small company? The answer is simple: privacy .
After all, while AI has achieved great success, controversies surrounding AI-related data breaches and model training have continued to accumulate. Users are beginning to realize that the real risk is not whether the model is "smart" or not, but whether the data or information "will be leaked".
So how exactly does Venice achieve its privacy policy? Its core philosophy is "You don't have to protect what you do not have." Simply put, Venice stores all of a user's content—prompts, replies, generated images, uploaded documents—none of its servers. This data is only encrypted and stored in the user's local browser (or device), and is permanently deleted once the browser data is cleared or the chat history is manually deleted.
Venice also explicitly states that it will not use user data for model training, will not log it, and will not analyze user behavior. This is in stark contrast to mainstream platforms (such as OpenAI and Anthropic), which often store conversations for a long time to improve models or for compliance reviews.
Furthermore, Venice distinguishes between two privacy modes with varying degrees of intensity: Private and Anonymized . The former offers the highest level of privacy, using open-source models that run on decentralized GPUs and process data without any identity-related information. Even if the underlying computing nodes briefly see the plaintext prompt, Venice itself cannot see or access the user's history. The latter mode allows the underlying vendors to see the prompt content, but Venice strips away all metadata (IP, account fingerprint, historical associations), making it impossible for them to track user information.
Therefore, although Venice isn't the most prominent provider, its privacy architecture makes it the "Privacy Preferred" highlighted in the OpenClaw documentation. OpenClaw's default model is currently Llama 3.3, but Erik himself suggested in a reply that users switch to the smarter GLM 4.6.
What does this mean for Venice itself?
OpenClaw is now spreading virally, with its usage volume entering a phase of exponential growth. With the official endorsement of OpenClaw, Venice's inference capacity requirements may also reach new heights. This means that Venice is undergoing a qualitative change. It will no longer be just "an AI project with an cryptographic background," but is attempting to become the default privacy backend for the mainstream open-source agent ecosystem.
According to the latest data released by Erik on March 1, Venice's API user base has grown rapidly since the beginning of 2026, and currently exceeds 25,000 users.
Token model: One-time investment, lifetime computing power
As a crypto project, can its token economy support this level of traffic growth?
Within the Venice ecosystem, there are two core tokens: VVV and DIEM . They are tightly bound together through a "one-way minting + reversible redemption" mechanism, forming a two-tiered economic structure.
VVV is the capital asset of the entire ecosystem, which can be held directly or pledged. Pledging VVV can continuously generate staking returns, currently around 19% annualized. Another key function of VVV is to mint IDEM, and it is the only way to generate DIEM.
After minting, DIEM can be traded on secondary markets, such as DEXs like Aerodrome and Uniswap. It can also be staked to activate consumer credit. DIEM represents a perpetually owned AI computing asset; 1 DIEM = $1 of Venice API credit per day, used to access all Venice models (text generation, image/video generation, code, etc.), including the most privacy-focused, censorship-free model in Private mode. This credit is permanently valid and automatically updated daily during your staking period, essentially a permanent AI subscription voucher.
The concept of $1 credit is rather abstract. Within the Venice ecosystem, it's not a fixed number of tokens, but rather inference resources worth $1 that can be consumed. More expensive models generate less content, while cheaper models generate more content. This abstract pricing makes DIEM a kind of "computing power share certificate." I had Venice's AI quantify the $1 credit for me:
Because traditional AI APIs are pay-as-you-go , the cost can explode exponentially for high-frequency, long-term, automated tasks (such as hundreds or thousands of calls per day by an AI agent). However, Venice completely revolutionizes this with DIEM , offering a one-time investment for a fixed, long-term credit limit . Currently, 1 DIEM is worth approximately $670, and after staking, you automatically earn $1 worth of API credit daily. To facilitate a comparison of whether purchasing IDEM or the traditional pay-as-you-go model is more cost-effective, I generated a rough table using Grok:
The data above shows that low-frequency users do not need to purchase DIEM at all. For medium- to high-frequency users, who need to run the Agent and generate a large amount of content every day, the marginal cost will continue to decrease over the long term, and IDEM has a clear advantage.
One user has already shared their experience, stating that staking 56 DIEMs allows them to use the Claude opus 4.6 model 24/7, while their principal is less than $10,000.
Furthermore, a credit rental market has already been developed by community users, where free, idle credits can be sold: cheaptokens.ai . The computing power ecosystem market surrounding Venice is emerging.
In summary, Venice's economic model is fundamentally about separating the " growth logic " from the " usage logic ." VVV, as a pure growth asset, carries the platform's overall valuation narrative and directly benefits from the positive flywheel of user growth, network effects, and ecosystem expansion. DIEM, as a perpetual subscription-based functional asset, truly serves product use and value consumption, bearing the consumption logic of daily interaction and task execution.
Based on current data performance, DIEM demonstrates significant advantages in long-term, high-frequency, and continuous task scenarios, aligning perfectly with the current agent-driven, intensive usage pattern. This strong real-world demand, in turn, effectively stimulates users' willingness to stake VVV, creating a positive feedback loop from the usage end to the growth end.
Supply and Deflation: The Real Background to Price Increases
According to data from the Venice official website, the current total supply of VVV tokens is 78.84 million , of which 7.89 million are locked, 30.6 million are staked (a staking rate of 38.8%) , and the circulating supply is only 44.34 million. In the initial economic model, the total supply of VVV tokens was 100 million, with 50% allocated for community airdrops to early Venice users, AI projects, and others. The airdrop window lasted approximately 45 days, and over 40,000 people ultimately claimed 17.4 million VVV, representing about 35% of the community allocation. The remaining unclaimed portion was approximately 32.68 million VVV, then worth about $100 million, which the team ultimately decided to permanently burn to reduce circulating supply and increase scarcity.
Starting in October 2025, Venice announced a reduction in its original emission plan of 10 million VVV/year to 8 million VVV/year, and simultaneously launched a monthly revenue buyback and burning mechanism. Currently, the monthly burning capacity is between 30,000 and 50,000 VVV, worth approximately $60,000 to $90,000. Currently, 42.71% of the token supply has been burned. Then, in early February 2026, the official announcement of another emission reduction plan reduced the VVV/year to 6 million VVV/year . This series of adjustments directly altered supply expectations. From the perspective of token price performance, this marked the starting point for VVV's price surge.
Therefore, the rise in VVV is not simply driven by narrative, but rather by the combination of changes in supply structure and increased demand .
Conclusion
As AI becomes central to our narrative, is crypto truly fading away? Venice is attempting to offer its own answer. If future intelligent agent systems require privacy-preserving backends, and if agents need long-term stable computing power structures, then encryption logic may not have disappeared.
