Recently, there has been a remarkable funding news in the AI + Crypto sector:

Venture capital led by Dragonfly has invested in the privacy-focused decentralized AI project @AskVenice, with an investment amount of $65 million. In this round of investment, besides Dragonfly, Coinbase also participated.

The condition of this investment is that @AskVenice offers equity + tokens (VVV).

I introduced the @AskVenice project (venice.ai) in a previous article. It serves as an AI intermediary; when users submit requests to it, it conceals the users' identity information and then forwards the requests to the corresponding AI large models.

In this process, users do not need to worry about their identity information being leaked, while also avoiding some geographical restrictions imposed by large models.

I checked, and in its latest available large model list, it also includes Anthropic's Fable 5. This resolves the challenges for many users who want to use Fable 5 but are constrained.

Therefore, in light of the restrictions and regulations from large model companies and concerns about personal privacy being leaked, it is not surprising that such decentralized AI applications are favored by capital.

The point of interest in this funding, besides the project's inherent qualities, is that the token rights have sparked controversy. This controversy has led many people in the overseas crypto circle to vote with their feet, driving down the price of VVV.

For users long immersed in the crypto ecosystem, there has always been a default understanding regarding projects in the ecosystem: all rights of a project can ultimately be attributed to its token.

In the early days of the blockchain era, this understanding was quite natural: a blockchain needs to operate, attract nodes to maintain its security, and reward nodes with tokens, which ultimately feed back economic benefits to tokens, so all its rights come down to the token.

Later, as application projects (such as DeFi) emerged, these projects could earn revenue based on their provided services without needing to rely on tokens as an intermediary, thus marginalizing the role of tokens in representing rights. However, DeFi projects endowed tokens with "governance functions," incentivizing user participation through airdrops, reintroducing "value connotation" to tokens.

But this value connotation, which has little relation to economic benefits, is fragile and cannot withstand scrutiny; as soon as a bear market hits, the value of such tokens is reverted to their original form.

More and more application-based crypto projects are also aware of the awkward situation of tokens, so they choose not to issue tokens, but rather to raise funds directly using their own equity, ultimately allowing investors to exit through an IPO.

Coinbase is a typical example of this.

Of course, there is still a category of companies that insist on attributing all rights to tokens, just like the predecessor projects.

Virtual is a typical example of this.

And sandwiched between these two situations are projects that have issued their own tokens while also retaining their equity.

For these projects, the awkwardness lies in that it is difficult to define the value of the tokens, making it challenging to delineate the boundaries and content of token rights—when users purchase their tokens, what exactly does that represent in the relationship between users and the project?

Venice is one of these.

According to the official statement, the issued VVV token has the right to use computational power (which can indeed be understood that way), and the project also uses its actual revenue to repurchase tokens.

These statements and actions appear similar to many projects with only tokens, easily leading users to think that VVV also represents all rights of the project.

However, it was only during the actual financing that people realized VVV does not represent equity, resulting in the token being sold off.

This matter has had significant impact overseas.

In the future, for crypto projects, the rights of tokens will definitely be clearly defined in the white paper:

Either only issue tokens, and the token will represent all rights, even if financing is needed, it will also be done by exchanging tokens for funds;

Or do not issue tokens, or even if tokens are issued, they do not represent equity, but are merely an adjunct.

This way, users can clearly assess the true value of the token when deciding whether to buy it.

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