Written by: Dingdang (@XiaMiPP)

Last week, the founder of Openclaw advised young people not to "waste time on cryptocurrency," which stirred the crypto industry. However, this week, a subtle turn of events occurred. In the official documentation of OpenClaw, a crypto project with a native token, Venice.ai, was quietly listed as a recommended model provider. Over the past month, the price of Venice's native token, VVV, has risen from around $1.5 at the low end to about $8.4 at its highest, an increase of over 500%.

On one side there is discouragement, and on the other, there is adoption. Why did OpenClaw choose to bring a project with a crypto token economic structure to the forefront?

The Origins of Venice: What Happens When Crypto OGs Enter AI?

To understand Venice, it is essential to comprehend OpenClaw's positioning. It is an open-source, self-hosted AI agent platform that can be integrated into chat software, becoming a user's 24/7 private assistant, aiding in email communication, calendar management, and more; however, OpenClaw itself does not provide AI large model (LLM) capabilities, but merely serves as an "execution and routing layer." The true intelligence (thinking, planning, generating responses) must come from external model providers.

Venice is a privacy-first, censorship-resistant generative AI platform, positioned as a decentralized version of ChatGPT. The project launched in May 2024 but has never undergone financing rounds and was entirely initiated by founder Erik Voorhees using personal funds.

Erik Voorhees is a crypto OG who entered the cryptocurrency industry in 2011. After the Mt. Gox collapse in 2014, he founded ShapeShift, one of the earliest trading platforms emphasizing non-custodial and privacy-first approaches. In 2021, he decided to let ShapeShift be governed by a DAO, completing its transition to decentralization. His career trajectory seems to revolve around "reducing trust dependence on centralized structures."

Another core member of the team is Teana Baker-Taylor, who has an impressive resume, having held executive positions at HSBC, Circle, Binance, and Crypto.com, responsible for operations and compliance. Most other members remain anonymous or low-key. According to publicly available data, Venice's team comprises around 20 members.

Currently, OpenClaw has chosen 22 model providers, including large tech companies like Amazon, Anthropic, and Cloudflare. In terms of scale and brand recognition, Venice is clearly not the most conspicuous one; in fact, it could be considered the least eye-catching. However, it was highlighted as a recommended provider with a native token economy structure in official documentation. It's also possible that this highlight was a misstep during document merging, as the highlight has now been removed, but it had already been included in OpenClaw's model provider list at an earlier time.

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

After all, as AI achieves significant success, controversies surrounding data breaches and model training related to AI continue to accumulate. Users are beginning to realize that the actual risk is not the "intelligence" of the model, but whether data or information "will be leaked."

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

Venice also clearly states that it does not use user data for model training, does not log, and does not analyze behaviors, sharply contrasting with mainstream platforms (such as OpenAI, Anthropic), which often store conversations long-term for model improvement or compliance checks.

Moreover, Venice distinguishes between Private and Anonymized privacy modes of different strengths. The former provides the highest privacy using open-source models that run on decentralized GPUs without any identifying information during processing. Even if the underlying computing nodes briefly see plain text prompts, Venice itself cannot see or access user history. The latter allows underlying vendors to see prompt content, but Venice will strip away all metadata (IP, account fingerprints, historical associations), making it impossible for them to track user information.

Thus, although Venice may not stand out in the provider list, its privacy architecture has earned it a special highlight as OpenClaw's "privacy preferred." Currently, OpenClaw's default model is Llama 3.3, but Erik himself suggested users switch to the smarter GLM 4.6 in his responses.

What does this mean for Venice itself?

OpenClaw is currently experiencing viral expansion, entering an exponential growth phase. With OpenClaw's official endorsement, it may elevate Venice's reasoning capacity requirements to a new level. This means Venice is undergoing a qualitative change. It will no longer be just "an AI project with a crypto background," but is attempting to become the default privacy backend in the mainstream open-source agent ecosystem.

From the latest data released by Erik on March 1, since the beginning of 2026, the number of users of 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 such a level of traffic growth?

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

VVV serves as the capital asset of the entire ecosystem, which can be held directly or staked. Staking VVV can continuously generate staking rewards, currently at an annualized rate of around 19%. Another key role of VVV is to mint DIEM, which is the only way to generate DIEM.

Once minted, DIEM can be traded on secondary markets, such as Aerodrome, Uniswap, and other DEXs. It can also be staked to activate consumption credit. DIEM represents a permanent AI computing asset that equals 1 DIEM = $1 per day of Venice API credit for calling all of Venice’s models (text generation, image/video generation, code, etc.), including the highest privacy censorship-free model in Private mode, and this credit is permanently effective, automatically updated daily during your staking period, equivalent to a lifetime AI subscription voucher.

The $1 credit is somewhat abstract, as it represents not a fixed "how many tokens," but rather a consumable resource worth $1 in inference. The more expensive the model, the less content generated; the cheaper the model, the more content generated. This abstraction in pricing converts DIEM into a kind of “computing power share certificate.” I had Venice's AI help me quantify the $1 credit:

Because traditional AI APIs charge pay-as-you-go, for high-frequency, long-term, automated tasks (like AI agents calling hundreds or thousands of times daily), costs can explode exponentially. However, Venice completely overturns this with DIEM, turning it into a one-time investment for long-term fixed quotas. Currently, 1 DIEM is valued at approximately $670, yielding $1 worth of API credit per day after staking. To facilitate comparison, I generated a rough table using Grok to see whether buying IDEM or traditional pay-as-you-go would be more advantageous:

From the data above, for low-frequency users, it is completely unnecessary to purchase DIEM, whereas for medium to high-frequency users who need to run agents daily and generate large content volumes, the marginal cost of long-term use will continuously decrease, making IDEM a clear advantage.

Some users have already come forward stating that they staked 56 DIEM, allowing them to use the Claude opus 4.6 model all day, with a principal amount of less than $10,000.

Moreover, community users have developed a credit leasing market, where unused credits can also be sold for free: cheaptokens.ai. A computing power ecological market around Venice is beginning to sprout.

Overall, the core of Venice’s economic model lies in separating the "growth logic" from the "usage logic." VVV, as a purely growth-oriented asset, carries the overall valuation narrative of the platform, directly benefiting from user growth, network effects, and ecological expansion as positive feedback loops; DIEM, as a permanent subscription-type functional asset, truly serves product usage and value consumption,承担日常交互、任务执行的消费逻辑。

From the current data performance, DIEM has shown significant advantages in long-term, high-frequency, continuous task scenarios, highly aligning with the current intensive usage patterns driven by Agents. This strong real demand, in turn, can effectively stimulate users' willingness to stake VVV, forming a positive feedback loop from usage to growth.

Supply and Deflation: The Real Background Behind Price Increases

According to the data provided by Venice's official website, the current total supply of tokens is 78.84 million, with 7.89 million locked and 30.6 million staked, leading to a staking rate of 38.8%, while the circulating supply is only 44.34 million. In the initial economic model, the total amount of VVV tokens was set at 100 million, of which 50% was allocated for community airdrops, targeting early Venice users and AI projects. The airdrop claiming window lasted approximately 45 days, and ultimately, over 40,000 people claimed 17.4 million VVV, accounting for about 35% of community distribution; the remaining unclaimed portion was approximately 32.68 million, worth about $100 million at that time, which the team decided to permanently destroy to reduce circulation supply and enhance scarcity.

Starting from October 2025, Venice announced a reduction of the original emission plan from 10 million VVV/year to 8 million VVV/year, and launched a monthly revenue buyback and destruction mechanism, with current monthly destruction capacity at 30,000 to 50,000 tokens, worth about $60,000 to $90,000. Currently, 42.71% of the token supply has been destroyed. Furthermore, in early February 2026, the official announced another emission reduction plan, further reducing the 8 million VVV/year to 6 million VVV/year. These series of adjustments directly changed the supply expectations. In terms of token price performance, this marks the starting point for VVV’s increase.

Thus, the rise of VVV is not merely narrative-driven, but rather a combination of changes in supply structure and growth in demand.

Conclusion

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

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