Original | Odaily Planet Daily (@OdailyChina)

Author | Ding Dang (@XiaMiPP)

Last week, Openclaw's founder's statement advising young people "not to waste time on cryptocurrency" stung the crypto industry. This week, however, there has been a subtle reversal. In OpenClaw's official documents, a cryptocurrency project with a native token, Venice.ai, has quietly been listed as a recommended model provider. Over the past month, Venice's native token VVV has risen from a low of around $1.5 to nearly $8.4, with a maximum increase of over 500%.

On one hand, there is dissuasion, and on the other, there is integration; why has OpenClaw chosen to push a project with a crypto token economic structure to the forefront?

Venice's Origins: What Happens When Crypto OGs Do AI?

To understand Venice, it is essential to first understand OpenClaw's positioning. It is an open-source, self-hosted AI agent platform that can connect to chat software, becoming a user's 24-hour personal assistant to help with sending and receiving emails, managing calendars, etc., but OpenClaw itself does not provide AI large language model (LLM) capabilities; it merely serves as an "execution and routing layer." The real intelligence (thinking, planning, generating responses) must come from external model providers.

Venice is a generative AI platform that emphasizes privacy and censorship-resistance, positioned as a decentralized version of ChatGPT. The project launched in May 2024, but has not received any funding, does not have venture capital rounds, and was entirely initiated by founder Erik Voorhees personally.

Erik Voorhees is a crypto OG who entered the crypto industry in 2011. After the collapse of Mt. Gox in 2014, he founded one of the earliest trading platforms emphasizing non-custodial and privacy-first principles, ShapeShift. 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 trusted centralized structures."

Another key figure on the team is Teana Baker-Taylor, who has an impressive resume, having held executive positions at HSBC, Circle, Binance, and Crypto.com, focusing on operations and compliance. Other members are mostly anonymous or discreet. According to current publicly available data, the Venice team comprises about 20 members.

OpenClaw currently has 22 model providers, including major tech companies like Amazon, Anthropic, and Cloudflare. In terms of scale and brand recognition, Venice is clearly not the most prominent and can even be considered the least notable. However, it was highlighted as a recommended model provider with a native token economy in official documents. It is also possible that this highlighting was a mistake during document merging; that highlight has already been removed, but it had entered OpenClaw's list of model providers earlier.

Nonetheless, why did OpenClaw choose an inconspicuous small company? The answer is simple: privacy.

After all, as AI experiences tremendous success, controversies around data leaks and model training related to AI continue to accumulate. Users are beginning to realize that the real risk is not whether the model is "smart," but whether data or information "might be leaked."

So how does Venice achieve its privacy? Its core philosophy is "You don’t have to protect what you do not have." In simple terms, Venice does not store any of the user’s content—prompts, responses, generated images, uploaded documents—on any Venice servers. This data is encrypted and only stored in the user’s own local browser (or device); once you clear your browser data or manually delete chat records, that content disappears permanently.

Venice also explicitly does not use user data for model training, does not log, and does not analyze behavior, setting it sharply apart from mainstream platforms (like OpenAI, Anthropic), which often long-term store conversations for model improvement or compliance auditing.

Moreover, Venice distinguishes between Private and Anonymized modes, offering two different levels of privacy. The former provides maximum privacy, utilizing open-source models that run on decentralized GPUs, processing without any identity-related information. Although the underlying computing node may briefly see the plaintext prompts, Venice itself cannot see or access the user's history. The latter allows underlying vendors to view prompt content, but Venice will strip all metadata (IP, account fingerprints, historical associations), making it impossible for them to trace user information.

Thus, despite Venice being less prominent in the provider list, its privacy architecture makes it the "privacy first choice" highlighted in OpenClaw's documents. Currently, OpenClaw's default model is Llama 3.3, but Erik himself recommends users switch to the smarter GLM 4.6 in his replies.

What does this mean for Venice itself?

OpenClaw is currently experiencing viral spread, with its invocation volume entering an exponential growth phase. With OpenClaw's official endorsement, it could lift Venice's inference capacity requirements to a new level. This means Venice is entering a qualitative change. It will no longer just be "an AI project with a crypto background," but is attempting to become the default privacy backend of the mainstream open-source agent ecosystem.

From Erik's latest data released on March 1, since the beginning of 2026, the number of users for Venice's API has seen rapid growth, currently exceeding 25,000 users.

Token Model: One-Time Investment for Lifetime Computing Power

As a crypto project, can its token economy sustain this level of growth in traffic?

In the Venice ecosystem, there are two core tokens: VVV and DIEM. They are closely linked through a "one-way minting + reversible redemption" mechanism, forming a dual-layer economic structure.

VVV is the capital asset of the entire ecosystem, which can be held directly or staked. Staking VVV generates continuous staking rewards, currently annualized at around 19%. Another key function of VVV is to mint DIEM, and it is the only way to generate DIEM.

After minting, DIEM can be traded on secondary markets, such as on DEXs like Aerodrome and Uniswap. It can also be staked to activate consumption credits. DIEM represents a permanent AI computing asset, with 1 DIEM equating to $1 per day in Venice API credit, used to invoke all models of Venice (text generation, image/video generation, code, etc.), including the highest privacy censorship-free model in Private mode, and this credit is permanently valid and automatically updated daily during your staking period, equivalent to a lifetime AI subscription coupon.

The $1 credit is somewhat abstract; within the Venice ecosystem, it is not a fixed "number of tokens," but rather a consumable resource worth $1 in inference. The more expensive the model, the less generated content; the cheaper the model, the more generated content. This abstract pricing makes DIEM a kind of "computing power share certificate." I had Venice's AI quantify the value of the $1 credit for me:

Because traditional AI APIs are pay-as-you-go, the costs for high-frequency, long-term, automated tasks (like an AI agent making hundreds or thousands of calls daily) would explode exponentially. However, Venice, through DIEM, has completely disrupted this into a one-time investment for a long-term fixed quota. Currently, 1 DIEM is valued at around $670, and after staking, you automatically receive a $1 API credit daily. For comparison, to see whether it's more cost-effective to purchase IDEM or use traditional pay-as-you-go, I generated a rough table using Grok:

Looking at the data above, low-frequency users do not need to purchase DIEM at all; if you are a medium to high-frequency user who needs to run agents daily and generate a lot of content, long-term use will continuously lower marginal costs, making IDEM have a clear advantage.

Some users have already come forward claiming that staking 56 DIEM allows them to use the Claude opus 4.6 model all day, with the principal being less than $10,000.

Moreover, community users have developed a credit leasing market where idle credits can also be sold for free: cheaptokens.ai. The computing power ecosystem market around Venice is just beginning to emerge.

Overall, the core of Venice's economic model lies in separating "strong growth logic" from "strong usage logic." VVV serves as a purely growth-type asset, bearing the overall valuation narrative of the platform, directly benefiting from user growth, network effects, ecological expansion, and other positive flywheels; DIEM serves as a permanent subscription-like functional asset, genuinely serving product usage and value consumption, accommodating daily interactions and task execution.

Based on current data performance, DIEM shows significant advantages in long-term, high-frequency, continuous task scenarios, highly aligning with the current agent-driven intensive usage model. Moreover, this strong real demand can stimulate users' willingness to stake VVV, forming a positive feedback loop from usage end to growth end.

Supply and Deflation: The Real Background of Price Surge

According to data provided by Venice's official website, the current total token supply is 78.84 million, of which 7.89 million are locked, and 30.6 million are staked, with a staking rate as high as 38.8%, leaving a circulating supply of only 44.34 million. In the initial economic model, the total amount of VVV tokens was set at 100 million, with 50% allocated for community airdrops targeting early Venice users, AI project parties, etc. The airdrop claim window lasted approximately 45 days, ultimately with over 40,000 people claiming 17.4 million VVV, accounting for about 35% of the community allocation; the remaining unclaimed portion, approximately 32.68 million, was valued at around $100 million at that time and was ultimately decided by the team to be permanently burned to reduce circulating supply and enhance scarcity.

Starting from October 2025, Venice announced that it will reduce the initial emission plan from 10 million VVV per year to 8 million VVV per year, while also initiating a monthly revenue buyback and burn mechanism, with current monthly burn capacity at 30,000 to 50,000 tokens, valued at about $60,000 to $90,000. Currently, 42.71% of the token supply has been burned. In early February 2026, the official announced another emission reduction plan, further decreasing the amount to 6 million VVV per year. This series of adjustments has directly changed supply expectations. From the token price performance perspective, this also marks the starting point for VVV's rise.

Therefore, the increase in VVV is not merely narrative-driven but the result of the combination of changes in supply structure and increased demand.

Conclusion

As AI becomes the narrative center of the era, is cryptocurrency really withdrawing? Venice is attempting to provide its own answer. If future intelligent agent systems need a privacy backend, and if agents require a long-term stable computing power structure, then the logic of cryptocurrency may not have disappeared.

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