Venice

Venice AI review: the verdict

Venice is the best consumer app for private AI inference available today, and a sound choice if you want capable open-weight models without your identity attached to your prompts. Its TEE and E2EE modes give hardware-attested privacy, while the default Private mode rests on Venice’s word that it keeps no logs. As a decentralised project it scores poorly: a closed-source proxy run by one company, no token governance, and a founder who is the single point of failure. The token side is stronger, with monthly buyback burns and repeated emission cuts, which is why Venice scores well on Returns and weakly on Freedom.

What it does

Venice is a private AI inferenceInferenceRunning a trained AI model to produce an answer. Inference is what happens when you type a prompt into ChatGPT and get a response. The model takes your input, computes a best guess, and returns it.Like asking an expert for their opinion. The training was the decades they spent becoming an expert. The inference is the 30 seconds it takes them to answer your specific question.Inference in the glossary → platform. You send prompts, Venice routes them through a centralised proxy to distributed GPUGPUGraphics Processing Unit. Originally designed to render video game graphics, GPUs turned out to be exceptionally good at the massively parallel math that AI models need. Modern AI training and inference runs almost entirely on GPUs.Like a factory with 10,000 workers doing the same simple task in parallel, versus a CPU which is more like 10 workers each doing different complex tasks. AI training involves doing simple math a million times per second on a million numbers, which is exactly what the GPU factory is designed for.GPU in the glossary → providers, and the response comes back. Venice says it stores neither prompts nor outputs: no logs, no conversation history on its servers, with everything kept in your browser’s local storage.

As of March 2026, Venice offers four privacy modes. Anonymous proxies requests to frontier models (GPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok) while hiding your identity from the provider. Private (the default) runs inference on zero-data-retention infrastructure. TEETEETrusted Execution Environment. A hardware-secured region of a CPU or GPU where code runs in isolation, so even the machine's operator can't read what's happening inside. TEEs give decentralised AI inference privacy guarantees.Like a bank vault inside a bank. The bank owns the building, staffs the lobby, and runs the security cameras. But what's inside the vault is invisible to everyone, including the bank staff, unless the customer opens it.TEE in the glossary → runs inference inside hardware-isolated secure enclaves operated by NEAR AI Cloud and Phala Network, with remote attestationAttestationA cryptographic proof that a piece of code is running on a specific hardware enclave in an unmodified state. Attestation lets remote users verify that a service is genuinely running what it claims to be running.Like a tamper-evident seal on a medicine bottle. The seal itself doesn't make the medicine safe, but it gives you a way to verify that nobody opened the bottle and swapped the contents before you bought it.Attestation in the glossary → you can independently verify. E2EE encrypts your promptPromptThe text you give an AI model to tell it what to generate. A prompt can be a simple question, a long instruction, a chunk of context plus a task, or a conversation history the model uses to produce its response.Like a brief you give to a junior designer. A vague brief gets a vague result. A detailed brief with context, constraints, and examples gets something usable. The quality of the output depends heavily on the quality of the brief.Prompt in the glossary → on your device before it leaves your browser; it stays encrypted through Venice’s proxy and is only decrypted inside a verified TEE enclave. Neither Venice nor the GPU provider can see your data at any point. TEE and E2EE are Pro features.

The base architecture works like this: your request hits a Venice-controlled proxy server that strips identifying information, then forwards to GPU providers that Venice describes as multiple decentralised providers, with TEE inference run by NEAR AI Cloud and Phala Network. In Private mode, providers see individual prompts but not who sent them. In TEE mode, prompts are processed inside hardware enclaves. In E2EE mode, prompts are encrypted before they leave your device. Responses stream back through the proxy, which Venice says purges all data immediately.

Founded by Erik Voorhees, the serial crypto entrepreneur behind SatoshiDice and ShapeShift. Venice launched in May 2024 with a team of roughly six people and has since grown to around 20 (LinkedIn directory and Tracxn, May 2026). The operation runs out of a Wyoming shell registration, with Voorhees based in Panama. Co-founder Teana Baker-Taylor (formerly VP of Policy at Circle and UK Director at Binance) served as COO from launch through January 2026 and has since departed to lead BasedAI as CEO (BasedAI emerged from stealth 13 May 2026). Venice has not publicly named a replacement COO, leaving Voorhees as the sole senior public face of the operation.

Venice is a company that runs a proxy server. Calling it a protocol overstates what it is, and the distinction matters for everything that follows.

The product in practice

Describing what Venice does is one thing; whether it’s any good to use is another. This draws on Venice’s usage data, its changelog and roadmap, community feedback on r/VeniceAI and Venice’s own Discord, and hands-on use of the app.

Who it’s for. Privacy-minded users, and heavily the creative-writing, roleplay and companion crowd. People who need frontier analytical reasoning tend to keep ChatGPT alongside it.

What it’s like to use. The web app is clean and close to ChatGPT, with auto-routing that picks a model for you and a one-box prompt that reads “ask anonymously”. Beyond text it spans image, video (text-, image- and video-to-video), audio, music, code and voice, plus a timeline video editor (Studio) and a community Feed. Model choice is deep and refreshed fast: 230+ models as of July 2026, with new releases usually landing within days. Kimi K3 landed within hours of release and, as an open-weight model Venice hosts itself, runs Private, the open-weight side of the per-model privacy split above.

Privacy is a per-model choice. The four modes above show up in the picker as a tag on every model. Venice’s own and open-weight models run Private (by Venice’s account, proxy-stripped and browser-local, with many TEE or E2EE eligible); the big closed models like Claude, GPT and Gemini are Anon, anonymised but still routed to the external provider. So the strongest privacy means picking a Private model, not whichever is smartest. The honest gap: an independent audit of that default Private proxy is the second most-voted open request on Venice’s own roadmap (524 votes in early October 2026) and still only “In Review” , which for a privacy-first product is the thing to watch.

Where it frustrates. The consistent knock from users is the reasoning ceiling on hard analytical work, and long chats that go repetitive or lose a style. Memoria, its local vector memory, is browser-local, so it doesn’t sync across devices and users call it rough. And its own community flags a live tension: the new Agentic Chat default moderates content the classic modes allowed, awkward for a platform whose pitch is no guardrails. Since September 2026 a recurring complaint on r/VeniceAI and Venice’s feedback board is the value of Pro, as models users treated as included moved to pay-per-credit, and users report the E2EE private models are often down.

What’s in the pipeline. As of early October 2026 the committed build is small: an Android characters app, letting characters analyse documents and images, and a model-info reference are the only items marked “In Progress”. The heavily-voted requests (a Deep Research assistant, multi-character chat, autonomous character messages) point hard at the roleplay and companion use case, where its keenest users already are. “Planned” and “Next up” sit empty, so beyond those three the near-term direction is community wishlist rather than committed roadmap. Separately, Venice has teased Minds: packaged, potentially monetisable custom AI experiences built by power users, an app-store-style distribution layer that points the platform toward developers as well as end users (Voorhees, July 2026), with creator rev-share hinted but not detailed.

Is it worth it. For using it: for creative, roleplay and privacy-conscious use it’s the one to reach for today, provided you don’t need frontier reasoning and you pick a Private model when privacy matters. For holding it: demand and product velocity are the bull case, while the unscheduled privacy audit, the reasoning ceiling, the agentic-versus-uncensored tension and Pro’s value as models move to credits are what could cap it.

For how Venice stacks up against other decentralised inference options, see Venice vs Morpheus vs Sentient. The DIEM staking-for-credit mechanism has its own tokenomics deep-dive.

Why Venice AI is uncensored, and what that actually means

“Uncensored AI” is a loaded term, so let me be specific about what Venice does and doesn’t do.

Venice serves open-weight models (DeepSeek, Llama, Qwen, Mistral and others) without corporate content policies layered on top. When you send a prompt to ChatGPT, OpenAI’s safety layer decides whether to answer. When you send the same prompt to Claude, Anthropic’s content policy makes the call. These are editorial decisions by private companies about what their AI is allowed to discuss.

Venice removes that layer. The models respond based on their trainingTrainingThe one-time process of teaching a neural network to perform a task by showing it massive amounts of example data and adjusting its internal weights until the outputs are good. Training builds the model; inference uses it.Like the years an apprentice spends learning a trade. You don't see any of the actual work, just thousands of repeated mistakes gradually becoming competence. By the end, the apprentice can do the job. The training was invisible, but the skill is now permanent.Training in the glossary →, not a corporation’s content policy. Pro subscribers can disable Safe Mode entirely, which removes even the modelModelA trained neural network that takes inputs (text, images, audio) and produces outputs (more text, classifications, generated content). In DeAI the model is the thing that actually does the work.Like a very experienced apprentice who has spent years watching thousands of masters make furniture. They can't explain how they know when a joint is right, but they can make a chair that looks and functions like a Chippendale. The training is invisible. The output is what matters.Model in the glossary →’s built-in guardrails where the model architecture permits it.

In practice, this means Venice handles prompts that centralised providers refuse. Security researchers can discuss vulnerabilities without triggering refusal responses. Creative writers are not blocked from mature themes. Medical researchers get direct answers about drug interactions rather than “please consult a healthcare professional.” I have had Claude refuse to help with completely legitimate research questions about smart contractSmart ContractA program stored on a blockchain that runs automatically when its conditions are met. Smart contracts are how blockchains do anything beyond just transferring tokens — DeFi, NFTs, DAOs, and DeAI infrastructure all run on smart contracts.Like a vending machine. You put in the right input and it produces the expected output, no human operator required. The rules are fixed in the machine itself, anyone can use it, and nobody can stop a transaction in the middle.Smart Contract in the glossary → exploits. Venice handles these without friction.

What Venice doesn’t do is serve illegal content. CSAM, direct instructions for mass violence, and other clearly illegal material are blocked at the platform level. “Uncensored” means no corporate content policy, not no rules at all. The distinction matters because critics conflate the two.

The open question is whether uncensored inference is a feature or a risk. For Venice, it is both. Security publications have flagged Venice as a tool for generating malware. If a credible real-world crime is traced to Venice-generated content, the regulatory response could be severe. The UK free tier is already blocked under FSMA. Voorhees is betting that the market for uncensored AI is large enough and legitimate enough to outweigh the regulatory risk. So far, that bet appears to be paying off. Venice publishes daily signup data; cumulative signups reached approximately 3.0M by mid-May 2026 (up from ~2.0M in early February), a cadence of roughly 300K per month.

Private AI inference: what Venice actually protects

How Private mode works

When you send a prompt to Venice, it hits a centralised proxy server that strips identifying information: your IP address, session data, anything that ties the prompt to you personally. The raw prompt then routes to GPU providers, which Venice describes as multiple decentralised providers without naming them. Those providers see individual prompts but not who sent them or the broader conversation context. Responses stream back through the proxy, and Venice says all data is purged immediately with nothing stored server-side.

Compare this with centralised alternatives. OpenAI retains conversations and trains on them by default (you can opt out, but the default is collection). Anthropic retains conversations for safety research and model improvement. Google processes prompts through infrastructure that feeds into its broader advertising and data ecosystem. Venice says it keeps no conversation history on its servers, with everything held in your browser’s local storage.

For the default Private mode, this is trust-based privacy, not cryptographically provable. The proxy is closed-source. No independent privacy audit has been completed despite being the second-most-requested feature from users (517 votes on Featurebase as of September 2026, behind only Deep Research among open requests) . Venice’s own privacy page calls Private mode trust-based, and until the architecture is independently audited, users are trusting Voorhees and a small team to honour that promise.

TEE and E2EE: cryptographic guarantees

In March 2026, Venice launched TEE and E2EE modes that move beyond trust. TEE mode runs inference inside hardware-isolated enclaves operated by NEAR AI Cloud and Phala Network. Each response includes a verification icon linking to a full attestation report, a cryptographic certificate proving the prompt was processed inside a secure enclaveEnclaveAn isolated region of CPU or GPU memory protected by hardware. Code and data inside the enclave are inaccessible to the operating system, the hypervisor, or even the machine's physical owner.Like a secure room inside a much larger office building. The building's caretakers have keys to every other room but not this one. What happens inside is invisible to them by design.Enclave in the glossary →. You can independently verify this without taking Venice’s word for it.

E2EE mode goes further. Your prompt is encrypted on your device before it leaves your browser. It stays encrypted through Venice’s proxy. It’s only decrypted inside a verified TEE enclave. Neither Venice nor the GPU provider can see your data at any point. The trade-off is functionality: E2EE disables web search and memory, and responses are slower. TEE mode retains full features including file uploads and auto-routing.

At the March 2026 launch, supported TEE/E2EE models included Venice Uncensored 1.1, GLM 5, Qwen 3.5 122B, Gemma 3 27B, and GPT OSS variants; Venice’s model API listed 12 such models in September 2026, all of them Venice-hosted. Both modes are Pro features. TEE and E2EE are available via APIAPIApplication Programming Interface. A structured way for one piece of software to talk to another. In DeAI, APIs let applications request inference from a model without running the model themselves.Like a waiter in a restaurant. You don't walk into the kitchen and cook your own meal. You tell the waiter what you want, they tell the kitchen, the kitchen cooks it, and the waiter brings it back. The API is the waiter.API in the glossary → as well as the web interface: developers select models by prefix (tee- or e2ee-) and E2EE requires client-side ECDH key exchange (secp256k1) with AES-256-GCM encryption, three custom headers, and streaming mode. Full implementation docs at docs.venice.ai.

Who needs which mode

For many use cases, the default Private mode is sufficient, and our private AI inference guide maps the level each mode reaches. If you are a journalist, lawyer, healthcare professional, or simply someone who doesn’t want a corporation indexing your AI interactions, Venice delivers materially more privacy than any mainstream alternative. And if you need cryptographic guarantees, Venice now offers them through TEE and E2EE, powered by the same infrastructure projects (Phala, NEAR) that we’ve reviewed as standalone investments.

Who benefits most: anyone in regulated industries handling sensitive data, anyone in jurisdictions with speech restrictions, developers building products that handle user data, and anyone who considers their AI interactions to be private by default. For a deeper look at why privacy matters for AI specifically, see Privacy Is the Killer App.

Value proposition

Venice sells privacy without friction. You open a browser, type a prompt, and get an uncensored response from open-source models (DeepSeek, Llama, Qwen, Mistral, FLUX and others) after a free sign-up, with no content restrictions to agree to. Pro subscribers can disable Safe Mode entirely. The free tier gives you 10 text prompts and 15 image generations per day.

The API is OpenAI-compatible. If you have existing code calling OpenAI, you change one base URL and your prompts now route through Venice’s privacy proxy instead. For developers, this is the killer feature. I use it daily.

The tokenTokenA digital unit of value or access rights tracked on a blockchain. Tokens can represent ownership in a project, a right to use a service, a share of future revenue, or simply a tradable asset with no underlying claim.Like a physical poker chip a casino issues. The chip itself has no value. What makes it worth something is what it lets you do at the casino, what the casino has promised, and how much other people will pay you for it.Token in the glossary → mechanics add a DeFiDeFiDecentralised Finance. Financial services like lending, trading, and yield farming built on smart contracts instead of traditional banks or brokerages. DeFi protocols are usually permissionless and global.Like a vending machine that can give you a loan, swap your currencies, or invest your savings. Nobody is behind the counter, the rules are written into the machine itself, and anyone with money in the right format can use it.DeFi in the glossary → angle. Stake VVV to earn emissions-based yield. To access inference via tokens, you lock staked VVV (sVVV) to mint DIEM. Each DIEM represents $1/day of perpetual, renewing API credit against any model on Venice (including Claude, GPT-5, Gemini and all open-source models). The mint rate follows an exponential curve: as DIEM supply approaches the target, the lock requirement rises sharply (more sVVV must be posted as escrow per DIEM minted). Burning DIEM unlocks your original sVVV. While locked, you still earn 80% of standard stakingStakingLocking up a cryptocurrency to help secure a blockchain network, usually in exchange for rewards. The locked tokens act as a security deposit that can be taken away if the staker misbehaves.Like putting down a large rental deposit for an apartment. You get the money back if you behave, you earn interest while it's locked, and the landlord takes it if you trash the place.Staking in the glossary → yields. Over 8.26 million VVV is currently held in escrow for DIEM, about 10% of effective supply. DIEM supply sits below the staged target: it briefly crossed the then-38,000 target in April-May, then net-burned back below as users released sVVV. In July 2026 Venice announced the target will rise to 40,000, staged in four steps from 3 August to 14 September (Odaily/Phemex-corroborated); all four steps landed on-chain on schedule, so the deployed target has been 40,000 since 14 September 2026. We track the live mint rate trajectory from on-chain data at /projects/venice/diem/. Minimum threshold is 0.1 DIEM to activate API credits.

OYM Live Data

438

sVVV per DIEM (today)

DIEM Mint Rate History

Full on-chain mint rate trajectory since launch, with milestone crossings, net-flow indicators and a lock calculator. Reconstructed from every Mint and Burn event on Base.

Open the live tracker → Updated 2026-10-19

A significant capacity optimisation changed DIEM allocation from dividing across all stakers to dividing among active API users only (those who made an API call in the last seven days). Venice puts the result at a 14x increase in DIEM capacity per token for actual users. This rewards active usage rather than passive staking.

The competitive position is clear. If you want private AI inference that actually works today, Venice is the only consumer product delivering it at scale. Venice’s published signup data shows approximately 3.0M total signups by mid-May 2026 (up from ~2.0M in early February, roughly 300K/month).

OYM Live Data

$20.1K

Per-event burn per day (7d)

VVV per-event buy-and-burn

On-chain VVV burned on each new subscription and, since 17 July 2026, each credit purchase ($5 per $100). Fires on new activity, not renewals. Source split and monthly trend on the chart at the top of this review.

Jump to the live chart → Updated 2026-10-12

Daily LLMLLMLarge Language Model. A neural network trained on vast amounts of text to predict the next word in a sequence. Modern LLMs (GPT, Claude, Llama, Qwen, DeepSeek) generate human-quality text and are the foundation of most modern AI products.Like an autocomplete that read every book ever written. It has no memory of individual texts but it has absorbed the patterns of language so deeply that it can generate paragraphs that sound human. The skill is statistical, not conscious.LLM in the glossary → token throughput tripled from approximately 20B in early February to over 60B in early May 2026 (figures cited in Yan Liberman’s Delphi Ventures writeup), a structural growth signal that subscription growth alone does not explain. Warden Protocol alone claims to drive roughly 1.5 million daily chats through the Venice backend.

The product ships fast. Nine modalities launched within 18 months:

• Text and code
• Image, video, music, audio
• Web search
• Voice mode
• Memoria (local vector memory)

Tokenomics

Venice tokenomics in brief: the VVV token is needed by holders who want API capacity, since staked VVV can be locked to mint DIEM, a perpetual $1-a-day API credit, while paying customers can use Venice without ever holding VVV. Value reaches holders through burns that Venice runs and no contract enforces: a monthly buyback funded by revenue, a per-event buy-and-burn on each new subscription and every credit purchase, and the one-off March 2025 burn of unclaimed airdrop tokens, which makes up most of the 33.91M VVV burned to date; burns on subscription renewals are only proposed. Locking sVVV for DIEM also takes VVV out of float while the DIEM is outstanding, reversibly. Dilution is 2 million VVV a year of emissions to stakers, 2.5% of effective supply, which still outruns the burns, plus the company’s 25% allocation with no published vesting schedule (how DIEM works).

VVV launched via airdropAirdropDistributing tokens for free to eligible wallets, usually to reward early users, bootstrap a community, or decentralise token ownership away from a small group of insiders at launch.Like a supermarket handing out free samples to people who already shop there. The samples cost the supermarket nothing to print. The goal is to convert casual shoppers into loyal customers by giving them something tangible to talk about.Airdrop in the glossary → in January 2025. No presale. No ICOICOInitial Coin Offering. A token sale where a project sells tokens directly to the public, usually before any product exists. ICOs dominated 2017-2018 funding and are now mostly replaced by airdrops, IDOs, or fair launches.Like a company selling shares to the public before going public, except with no SEC oversight, no audited financials, and often no product at all. The 2017 ICO boom showed why those guardrails exist in traditional finance.ICO in the glossary →. No private roundVCVenture Capital. Private investors who fund projects at an early stage in exchange for equity or token allocations. VC rounds are typically pre-launch, at steep discounts to any future public price, with multi-year vesting.Like angel investors in a startup who buy shares before the company goes public. They take more risk because the company might fail, so they get a better price. Once the company IPOs they can sell, and the public market pays whatever price it thinks is fair.VC in the glossary →. No VC token allocation. Voorhees self-funded the company through launch and until its first external raise, a $65M Series A at a $1B valuation in July 2026 (led by Dragonfly, with Coinbase Ventures and North Island Ventures); that round is equity in the company, not a VVV token sale. Genesis supply was 100 million VVV, distributed as follows:

• Airdrop to Venice users: 25% (100,000+ eligible wallets, 45-day claim window)
• Airdrop to crypto AIDeAIDecentralised AI. An umbrella term for blockchain-based projects that build AI infrastructure (compute, data, inference, models, agents) without a single central provider controlling the system.Like the difference between streaming a movie from Netflix and sharing it via BitTorrent. Netflix is fast and polished but one company controls what you can watch and what you pay. BitTorrent is messier but no single operator can shut you out.DeAI in the glossary → communities: 25% (Virtuals, Aero, Degen, aixbt, Morpheus and others)
• Company operations: 25% (no published vestingVestingA schedule that locks up tokens allocated to insiders, investors, and team members, releasing them gradually over months or years. Vesting prevents insiders from dumping on public buyers immediately after launch.Like a new employee's stock options at a startup. You don't get all the shares on day one. They unlock over four years so you stick around and do the work rather than cashing out and leaving.Vesting in the glossary → schedule)
• Team: 10% (25% unlocked at launch, remainder vesting over 24 months)
• Incentive fund: 10% (developer grants of $5,000-$100,000)
• LiquidityLiquidityHow easily a token can be bought or sold without moving the price. High liquidity means you can enter or exit large positions quickly at the quoted price. Low liquidity means even small trades can swing the market.Like the difference between selling a house and selling a share of Apple stock. The house might be worth more on paper, but finding a buyer at that price takes weeks. The Apple share converts to cash in one click.Liquidity in the glossary →: 5% (deployed to Aerodrome DEXDEXDecentralised Exchange. A trading venue where token swaps happen entirely through smart contracts, with no central operator holding user funds. The largest DEXes are Uniswap, Aerodrome, Raydium, PancakeSwap, and Curve.Like a self-service vending machine that lets you swap one type of coin for another. The machine sets the exchange rate based on its current stock, anyone can deposit coins to refill it, and there's no clerk behind the counter.DEX in the glossary → on Base)

The airdrop distribution was generous. When 32.5 million tokens went unclaimed after the 45-day window, Venice burned them rather than reclaiming them. That burnBurnPermanently removing tokens from circulation by sending them to an address that no one controls. Burns reduce total supply, which (all else equal) makes each remaining token worth more of the network's value.Like a company buying back its own shares and shredding them. The company's total value stays the same, but each remaining share now represents a slightly bigger slice of that value.Burn in the glossary →, valued at roughly $100 million at the time, removed about a third of genesis supply permanently. Combined with ongoing revenue buybacks, the burn address now holds 33.91M VVV, equal to 41.8% of effective supply (total minted minus burns) per direct on-chain measurement. BaseScan confirms the 0x0 balance on the VVV contract (0xacFE6019Ed1A7Dc6f7B508C02d1b04ec88cC21bf).

EmissionsEmissionsNew tokens created and distributed by a blockchain protocol over time as rewards to validators, stakers, or miners. Emissions fund network security and participation at the cost of diluting existing holders.Like a company that pays employees partly in newly printed shares. Every year the total number of shares goes up, which means existing shareholders own a slightly smaller slice of the same company unless the company grows faster than the printing.Emissions in the glossary → have been cut through eight reductions since launch: 14 million → 10 million (20 August 2025) → 8 million (23 October 2025) → 6 million (11 February 2026) → 5 million (1 May 2026) → 4 million (1 June) → 3 million (1 July) → 2.5 million (1 September) → 2 million VVV annually from 1 October 2026. That is 86% below the launch rate. The October step is on BaseScan: the 4-of-6 multisig called setEmissionRate on the staking contract at 14:10 UTC on 1 October.

Every step above is measured rather than taken from the announcement. Burns on VVV are transfers to the zero address and leave total supply untouched, so the change in total supply between two blocks is exactly what was minted between them, and reading it daily dates each cut from the point the slope changes. Every announced step landed on the announced day. It also settles a contradiction inside Venice’s own public FAQ, where one answer puts launch emissions at 10 million and another at 14 million: the chain reads 14 million across four separate windows before 20 August 2025.

With the DIEM restructure, stakers receive 100% of emissions (80% when sVVV is locked for DIEM). The discretionary monthly buybackBuybackUsing protocol revenue to purchase tokens on the open market, usually to burn them or return them to a treasury. Buybacks convert business income into upward pressure on the token by reducing circulating supply.Like a public company using profits to repurchase and retire its own shares. The cash leaves the company's balance sheet, the share count drops, and every remaining shareholder owns a slightly bigger slice of the same business.Buyback in the glossary →, a CoW-Swap TWAP programme, has been active since December 2025. On-chain the monthly USD value, priced at the moment of each burn, was choppy through the first half (about $65K in December 2025, $91K in January, $80K in February, $116K in March, $111K in April) then climbed from May, reaching about $413K in September as both revenue and the token price rose. The burn-vs-emissions strip on the chart at the top of this review tracks it month by month.

Measured against new emissions, the buyback isn’t net deflationary yet, though the gap has closed sharply. On the monthly buyback alone, coverage fell from 8.4% in December 2025 to 2.7% in May 2026 as the token price outpaced the buyback budget, then recovered to 9.1% in July and 10.7% in August. Adding the per-event subscription and credit burns, it reached 15.0% in July, 21.8% in August and 17.7% in September as those streams scaled and issuance came down. Annual issuance now runs at 2.5% of effective supply against 6.3% at the 5 million rate, and Venice’s stated goal is a net deflationary VVV with native yield where burns exceed emissions.

The launch was not clean. On day one, two Aerodrome contributors purchased VVV before public announcements, turning $50,000 into over $1 million within an hour. Aerodrome flagged the trades within 30 minutes and suspended both individuals within three hours. VVV dropped 50% on the allegations. The insider trading was external to Venice, but it still dented launch credibility.

The $22.58 peak reached one day after launch stood as VVV’s all-time high until September 2026, when the token set a new one (CoinGecko). Listed on Coinbase, Kraken, KuCoin, Bybit, Gate.io, OKX and Binance futures. See live data above for current pricing.

How to participate

Use the platform. The simplest entry point. The free tier needs a sign-up, per Venice’s pricing page. As of April 2026, Venice runs four tiers. Pro at $18/month (10% off annual) for unlimited text in the web app, 1,000 daily image generations, advanced model access (including Claude and GPT-5.x), voice mode and Memoria, plus 100 monthly credits for video/music/premium models and pay-per-use API. Pro Plus at $68/month adds 7,500 monthly credits with two-month credit banking (unused credits carry forward). Max at $200/month gives 22,500 monthly credits, three-month credit banking, and the highest image generation limits. 100 credits equal $1 USD. Pro does not include direct API access; API usage is billed separately via purchased credits, DIEM staking, or x402 USDC pay-per-request (see below).

Stake VVV. Staking VVV earns emissions-based yield (nominal APY ranges from 20-72% depending on the period), but this yield comes from newly minted VVV, not protocol revenue. Net yield depends on whether VVV holds value against the inflationInflationThe annual rate at which new tokens are created and added to the circulating supply. Most networks use inflation to pay validators, stakers, and infrastructure providers from freshly minted tokens rather than real revenue.Like a landlord who raises the rent every year. If your salary goes up at the same rate, you break even. If it doesn't, you get poorer without noticing, because the number on your payslip hasn't changed but the ground under it has shifted.Inflation in the glossary →. Staking alone doesn’t give you inference access. Seven-day unstaking cooldown.

Lock and mint DIEM. To access inference via tokens, lock your staked VVV (sVVV) into the DIEM escrow on the Venice token dashboard. Each DIEM represents $1/day of perpetual, renewing API credit. Stake DIEM (minimum 0.1) to activate access to all models on Venice including Claude, GPT-5 and Gemini. The mint rate rises exponentially as DIEM supply approaches the target set by Venice; supply now sits at 91.8% of the 40,000 target, back below it after crossing the old target in April-May. Early minters paid a fraction of today’s rate. While your sVVV is in escrow, you still earn 80% of standard staking yields. To exit, burn the same amount of DIEM you minted to unlock your original sVVV (partial unlocks permitted). DIEM also trades on Aerodrome (Base) and was added to Coinbase Exchange in late April 2026 (DIEM/USD pair). You can buy it directly instead of minting, though the secondary market price has risen sharply through April 2026. Over 8.26 million VVV is currently in escrow for DIEM, about 10% of effective supply. A recent capacity optimisation means DIEM allocation is now divided among active API users (those with an API call in the last seven days) rather than all stakers, which Venice says gives a 14x capacity increase per token for active users. For the full mechanism, mint curve maths and short-squeeze risk vector, see our DIEM tokenomics deep-dive.

Getting started. The fastest path to Venice is the web app at venice.ai. The free tier (10 text prompts, 15 images per day) needs only a sign-up. Pro at $18/month gets you unlimited text with advanced models including Claude, GPT-5 and Gemini, 1,000 daily image generations, voice mode and Memoria. Heavy video/music users will want Pro Plus ($68/mo) or Max ($200/mo) for the larger monthly credit allocations. For developers, the API is OpenAI-compatible (change one base URL) with four payment paths: prepaid credits (pay per token), DIEM staking, direct Pro tier allocations, or x402 USDC rails. Available API models include DeepSeek V3, Llama 4 Maverick, Qwen 3.5, Kimi K2.5 and others across text, image, code, and audio.

Build on the API. The OpenAI-compatible API is the developer on-ramp. The $27 million incentive fund has run two cohorts (110+ applications in Cohort 1, roughly 30 semifinalists in Cohort 2). Grants range from $5,000 to $100,000 in VVV. In April 2026, Venice added x402 support on the chat/completions endpoint: agents and developers can pay per request in USDC on Base, with a $5 minimum top-up. If you hold staked DIEM, your DIEM allocation is consumed before any USDC is debited. x402 is a credible agent-native payment rail but it does not create direct VVV demand; its contribution to the token economy is indirect, via the subscription and API revenue that funds the monthly buyback burn.

Honest assessment

What works

Venice is the best consumer-facing private AI inference product available today. That is not a high bar, but Venice clears it convincingly. Privacy architecture is substantively well-considered. Staking creates working utility demand rather than empty governance theatre. No VC allocation means no unlock schedule looming over the token. Product velocity has been impressive: text, image, video, audio, music, code, web search, voice mode and Memoria all shipped within 18 months of launch. And the aggressive supply tightening (33.91M VVV at the burn address, 41.8% of effective supply on-chain, emissions cut 86% from 14M to 2M annually across eight steps the chain confirms, monthly revenue-funded buyback burns running every month since December 2025) shows a team that actually understands tokenomics.

What doesn’t work yet

Governance. VVV holders have no decision-making power, and Venice states as much: the VVV launch post lists “No governance” in its token details. No Snapshot, no Tally, no on-chain governanceDAODecentralised Autonomous Organisation. A way to coordinate decisions and manage a treasury using token-weighted voting instead of a traditional company structure. Token holders propose and vote on changes directly.Like a shareholder-run company where every shareholder can vote on every decision, the votes are public, and the company can't do anything the shareholders don't approve. The coordination is messier than a normal company but nobody has unilateral control.DAO in the glossary → contracts. Mint authority and staking-upgrade authority sit with a 4-of-6 multisig that has no timelock, so all eight emission reductions and the DIEM launch were unilateral team decisions. The Featurebase upvote board collects feature requests, which is useful, but it is not governance.

The risk

Voorhees is the single point of failure. Founder, CEO, sole funder until the July 2026 Series A, and now the only senior public face of a roughly 20-person company after co-founder and COO Teana Baker-Taylor departed in January 2026 (she is now CEO of BasedAI, which emerged from stealth on 13 May 2026). No public board. The July 2026 Series A ($65M at a $1B valuation, led by Dragonfly with Coinbase Ventures and North Island Ventures) brought Venice’s first external investors, but there is still no disclosed succession plan and no publicly named replacement COO. One personal SEC settlement on his record (SatoshiDice 2014, unregistered securities, $50,843). The 2024 ShapeShift AG settlement ($275,000, unregistered dealer) was against the company entity, not Voorhees personally, though he founded it and was CEO during the period in question. The ShapeShift precedent is instructive: Voorhees built a centralised crypto exchange, hit regulatory walls, then pivoted to a DAO structure. Venice’s trajectory could follow a similar path.

The cybersecurity angle is the less obvious risk. Security publications (Certo, CyberPress, CPO Magazine, Infosecurity Magazine) have flagged Venice as a tool for generating malware. One real-world crime credibly traced to Venice-generated content could trigger a regulatory crisis. The UK free tier is already blocked under FSMA. Other jurisdictions will follow.

The closed-source proxy is both the product and the vulnerability. If it goes down, the entire service stops. If it is compromised, prompts in Private and Anonymous modes are exposed (E2EE prompts remain encrypted even if the proxy is compromised, which is the point). No independent privacy audit of the proxy itself has been completed despite being the second most-voted open request from users (517 votes on Featurebase, September 2026). The March 2026 TEE/E2EE launch partially addresses this: for users on those modes, the privacy guarantee is now hardware-attested and independently verifiable. For Private mode users (the majority), it remains trust-based.

My position

I hold VVV and DIEM. I stake VVV for API access and use Venice daily for both the web interface and API calls. I find the product useful. I also recognise that I am trusting a small, closely held company with my inference privacy, and that trust isn’t the same as a cryptographic guarantee.

Freedom Score: 56/100

C grade. Full methodology at Freedom Score Methodology.

Infrastructure decentralisation (9/20): Venice says its GPUs come from multiple decentralised providers, and its privacy page names NEAR AI Cloud and Phala Network for TEE inference. Multiple providers give some hardware distribution. But Venice still runs a centralised, closed-source proxy that routes all requests. Single point of control and failure. Users can’t choose their GPU provider. A small ~20-person team operates the entire stack.

Governance decentralisation (5/20): VVV carries no governance rights, by Venice’s own description. No voting interface, no proposal system, no quorum mechanism, and mint plus upgrade authority held by a 4-of-6 multisig with no timelock. Voorhees is sole funder, CEO and primary decision-maker; co-founder Teana Baker-Taylor served as COO from launch until January 2026 and departed to lead BasedAI, with no publicly named replacement. All eight emission reductions and the DIEM launch were unilateral team decisions, and Venice is transparent about being a company rather than a DAO, which is at least honest.

Token distribution fairness (11/15): No presale, no ICO, no VC token allocation; the July 2026 Series A raised equity in the company, not tokens, so it does not dilute VVV holders. 50% of genesis airdropped. 32.5 million unclaimed tokens burned rather than retained. Team allocation 10% with 24-month vesting. The insider trading incident was external (Aerodrome contributors, not Venice team). Company operations allocation (25%) has no published vesting schedule, which is a gap.

Censorship resistance (11/15): The strongest censorship resistance of any consumer AI product today. Pro subscribers can disable all content filtering. Open-source models that can’t be centrally recalled. But Venice controls the proxy and can theoretically blockBlockA batch of transactions added to a blockchain at a set interval. Each block cryptographically links to the previous one, creating an append-only chain that can't be rewritten without redoing all the work since.Like a page in a ledger. Every page has a fixed number of entries, every page references the previous page, and once a page is filled and signed off it can't be edited without visibly invalidating every page that came after. The chain is just a very long series of these sealed pages.Block in the glossary → users, models or content types. Free tier already blocked in the UK. The resistance is a business decision, not an architectural guarantee.

Data sovereignty (11/15): Venice states it stores no prompts or responses server-side in any mode, with conversation history in local browser storage only; nobody outside Venice has verified that. Proxy strips identifying information before forwarding to GPUs. Strong privacy architecture with minimal metadata collected and crypto payment option. In Private mode, GPU providers see individual prompts but not user identity or full conversation history. Privacy relies on architectural isolation and Venice’s policy rather than cryptographic guarantees. No independent privacy audit exists despite being the second most-voted open request. Competitors (Phala, Secret Network) offer stronger cryptographic privacy at the computation layer.

Open source and transparency (9/15): Uses open-source AI models. Smart contracts verified on BaseScan. CLI and agent runtime are open source. But the core inference engine, proxy layer, and platform code are all closed source. Venice’s privacy claims cannot be independently verified because the proxy code is not public. No independent privacy audit despite it being the second most-voted open request. Revenue and financials not disclosed.

Path to improvement

Three changes would materially increase Venice’s score:

1. Expand E2EE to all models and free tier. The March 2026 E2EE/TEE launch is a breakthrough, but it’s limited to Pro subscribers and a subset of models. Extending hardware-attested privacy to free tier users and the full model catalogue would make Venice’s privacy guarantee universal rather than tiered.
2. Open-source the proxy layer. The centralised, closed-source proxy is the primary freedom score deduction. Open-sourcing it would not eliminate the centralisation (Venice would still operate the instance), but it would allow independent verification and, eventually, self-hosted alternatives. The TEE/E2EE modes reduce the proxy’s trust requirements, but the proxy still handles routing for all modes.
3. Timelock the multisig, then ship signal voting. The 4-of-6 Safe can change emissions or upgrade the staking logic instantly. A timelock would give holders an exit window before any change lands, which is worth more than a vote. Snapshot signal votes on top would give stakers a documented voice, something Venice has never offered and has never claimed to.

Returns Score: 69/100

B grade. Full methodology at Returns Score Methodology.

Token utility (16/20): VVV has a well-designed utility loop. Staking VVV earns emissions-based yield, and holding sufficient staked VVV grants pro account access. To get inference from tokens, you lock staked VVV to mint DIEM, then stake DIEM. Your inference capacity is proportional to your share of staked DIEM. Each DIEM represents $1/day of perpetual API credit against any model. This creates lock-up demand from heavy API users. The April 2026 x402 launch adds a fourth payment rail (USDC on Base) but routes through any staked DIEM allocation first, so DIEM utility is preserved. The utility is practical and directly tied to product usage rather than abstract governance rights that nobody exercises.

Value accrual (13/20): Venice runs three on-chain VVV burn streams. The discretionary monthly buyback (a CoW-Swap TWAP programme) has been active since December 2025; its monthly USD value, priced at burn time, was choppy early (about $65K in December 2025 to $116K in March) then climbed several-fold from May as revenue and the token price rose, to about $413K in September. On top of it sit two per-event streams: a tier-aware burn on each new subscription ($2 Pro, $5 Pro Plus, $10 Max, tier-aware since 26 April 2026), and since 17 July 2026 a credit-purchase burn ($5 of every $100 of credits, API included, roughly $6K/day at launch). On-chain, the two streams together now burn about $17.3K a day on a 30-day average; venicestats, using Venice-fed classification, puts the larger share on credit purchases.

Both per-event streams fire on new activity, not renewals; Venice flagged renewal-triggered burns as a future addition on its 22 July 2026 community call. A structural tailwind sits underneath the flow: Venice does not train models, so it sidesteps the frontier labs’ training-cost recoup race, and management says Series A capital will fund owned GPUs and data centres to cut inference cost and route the saved margin into larger burns. Two caveats still bind. The per-event burn is a budget figure rather than revenue, and neither it nor the USDC-based x402 rail creates direct VVV demand, so value accrual stays indirect and mediated by the buyback while Venice keeps revenue unpublished.

One structural point on the token side, often missed in the standard “token isn’t equity” framing. Voorhees self-funded the company until the July 2026 Series A ($65M at a $1B valuation, led by Dragonfly with Coinbase Ventures and North Island Ventures), which introduces an equity preference stack ahead of VVV holders for the first time. That reintroduces the common crypto failure mode where economics can accrue to a preferred equity class while the token is left structurally stranded, widening the token-versus-equity discount that applies to an already-indirect claim. The August 2026 review weighed this and nudged Value Accrual up a point on the strengthening on-chain burn (discretionary buyback up several-fold, two per-event streams added, DeFiLlama-tracked burn spend up sharply), while holding Revenue Sustainability pending independently-verified revenue (see Score change log).

Supply dynamics (15/20): Genesis supply was 100 million VVV with no presale or VC allocation, which is a strong starting point. The 32.5 million unclaimed airdrop tokens were burned rather than reclaimed, a credibility-building move worth approximately $100 million at the time. Emissions have been cut eight times since launch, from 14 million down to 2 million VVV annually on 1 October 2026, an 86% reduction. Every rate and every date in that ladder is read off the chain rather than off the announcement, and each step landed when Venice said it would. Monthly revenue buyback burns have been active since December 2025, creating a two-sided tightening: less new supply entering, existing supply being permanently removed. On-chain reads put 33.91M VVV at the burn address (41.8% of effective supply). The problem remains the company operations allocation: 25% of genesis supply with no published vesting schedule. Voorhees self-funded the project through launch; the July 2026 Series A was equity, so it adds no VC token overhang, but the company can still sell its allocation at any time without constraint. Annual inflation is now 2.5% at the 2M rate.

Revenue sustainability (13/25): Venice publishes daily signup data and reports approximately 3.0M total signups by mid-May 2026 (up from ~2.0M in early February, a cadence of roughly 300K/month) and Liberman’s May 2026 writeup cites ~60B+ daily LLM tokens processed (tripled from ~20B/day in early February). Warden Protocol alone accounts for roughly 1.5 million daily chats, by Warden’s own account. The subscription model now covers four tiers (Free, Pro $18/mo, Pro Plus $68/mo, Max $200/mo) plus two API-specific rails (prepaid credits, x402 USDC on Base). That tier expansion is the most significant commercial move since launch. It signals that heavy users were willing to pay substantially more than Pro but had nothing to pay for, a common indicator of product-market fit. x402 provides an agent-native rail without requiring developers to hold VVV, lowering friction for autonomous agent integrations.

Venice still does not publish revenue. Yan Liberman of Delphi Ventures derived an ARR proxy from the public data in a May 2026 writeup: approximately $60M current ARR, with an annualised addition rate of roughly $200M accelerating through the latest weekly data. The derivation chains signup pace, an assumed 5% lifetime paid conversion against the cumulative signup base, weighted ARPPU close to the $18 Pro tier (most subscribers remain on Pro), and a roughly 50/50 split between subscription and API ARR (peer benchmark plus the disproportionate token-throughput ramp that subscriber growth alone does not explain). This is a third-party derived estimate, not a verified figure; the on-chain burn flows (the discretionary monthly buyback plus the per-event subscription and credit burns) remain the only directly verifiable spend proxy, and they are a burn budget rather than revenue itself. The sustainability of a roughly 20-person operation running infrastructure of this scale remains an open question, but the published signup cadence and the token-throughput trajectory are pointing in the same direction.

Liquidity and access (12/15): VVV is well-covered for a token of its market cap. Listed on Coinbase, Kraken, KuCoin, Bybit, Gate.io, OKX, Crypto.com, eToro, Upbit (KRW/BTC/USDT) and Robinhood for US retail, with Binance futures. The Base-native DEX liquidity through Aerodrome provides a solid decentralised trading option. You can enter and exit positions of reasonable size without difficulty. The Aerodrome insider trading incident on launch dayTGEToken Generation Event. The moment a project's token first becomes tradeable. TGE is when vesting clocks usually start, when liquidity hits exchanges, and when public price discovery begins.Like the IPO day for a startup. Everything that happened before TGE was private valuations and paper agreements. Everything after is the public market deciding what the thing is worth in real time.TGE in the glossary → was a credibility hit but did not structurally impair liquidity. Exchange coverage is strong relative to comparable DeAI tokens.

Path to improvement

Three changes would materially increase Venice’s returns score:

1. Publish revenue figures. The buyback burn mechanism only matters if holders can verify the numbers. Quarterly revenue disclosure (even aggregate figures without client-level detail) would let the market price VVV on fundamentals rather than trust. Every other dimension of the token economy is transparent; revenue is the conspicuous gap.
2. Publish the company operations vesting schedule. The 25% company allocation with no vesting constraint is the largest unresolved supply risk. A time-locked, on-chain vesting schedule would remove ambiguity and align the company’s token management with holder interests.
3. Grow the DIEM adoption base. DIEM is the most elegant lock-up mechanism in the DeAI space: it converts VVV staking into perpetual API credit. But adoption depends on API usage growth. Expanding the developer community, running more grant cohorts, and building integrations that drive sustained API demand would increase DIEM minting, which locks VVV and tightens effective supply.

Frequently asked questions

Is Venice AI private? In its default Private mode, Venice strips your identity before a prompt reaches a GPU, and says it stores no prompts or responses, keeping chat history in your browser. The GPU provider still reads the prompt text. Venice’s TEE and E2EE modes, on paid plans, run inference inside hardware enclaves operated by NEAR AI Cloud and Phala, so the provider can’t read it.

Is Venice AI safe to use? For everyday prompts, yes, with one caveat. In the default Private mode you’re trusting Venice’s claim that it keeps no logs, because its proxy is closed source and no independent audit has checked it. The TEE and E2EE modes remove that trust for the inference step. Some security publications have flagged Venice as a tool for writing malware, which is a regulatory risk for the service.

Is Venice AI legit? Yes. Venice is a Wyoming-registered company founded by Erik Voorhees, launched in May 2024, and took its first outside investment in a July 2026 Series A led by Dragonfly. The caveat is concentration: a small team, no public board, and a founder with past SEC settlements over SatoshiDice and ShapeShift.

Is Venice AI good? If privacy matters to you, yes. It’s the most usable private AI app available, and the free plan is enough to judge it. Pro pays off if you want the larger models, more images and switchable content filtering. For cryptographic privacy, use the TEE or E2EE modes, because the default mode relies on Venice’s policy.

Is Venice AI free? Yes, with limits. The free plan gives base models, 10 text prompts and 15 image prompts a day after signing up, per Venice’s pricing page.

How much does Venice Pro cost? As of September 2026, Pro is $18 a month, with unlimited text prompts, 1,000 images a day, the Pro models and credits for video, music and frontier models. Higher tiers add more credits. API use is billed separately through credits, staked DIEM or x402.

Is Venice AI uncensored? Largely. Venice runs open-weight models without corporate content policies, and Pro subscribers can switch off content filtering. Venice still controls its proxy, so it could block users or models if it chose to.

How is Venice different from ChatGPT? ChatGPT keeps your chats under OpenAI’s policies. Venice says it stores none, hides your identity from the GPU provider, and offers hardware-attested TEE and E2EE modes. Venice also gives anonymised access to closed models such as GPT and Claude, though those still run at the external provider.

Do I need the VVV token to use Venice? No. The web app runs on a normal subscription. VVV matters if you stake it to mint DIEM for API access or want exposure to Venice’s buyback-and-burn, covered in the tokenomics section above.

Score change log

Date	Score	Change	Reason
2026-10-07	Data	N/A	Free tier corrected from “no account” to sign-up required, per Venice’s pricing page. Scores unchanged.
2026-10-06	Data	N/A	Monthly buyback values re-read at burn-time prices from our index (March, not April, remains above its neighbours); coverage now split into buyback-only and both-stream figures; “most of distributed VVV is burned” dropped. Tokenomics opens on demand, value capture and dilution. Scores unchanged.
2026-10-04	Editorial	N/A	Product-in-practice sweep: privacy-audit vote count refreshed to 524 (still In Review), Private mode attributed to Venice, pipeline dated, and the September 2026 community complaint about Pro value added. Scores unchanged.
2026-10-04	Data	N/A	The 1 October cut to 2M VVV a year executed on schedule: the multisig called setEmissionRate on sVVV (BaseScan tx 0xe729…a2799) and supply growth since matches 2M a year. Emissions wording moved from scheduled to enacted. Scores unchanged.
2026-09-27	Editorial	N/A	Added a review verdict up top and FAQ entries on whether Venice is safe, legit and good. No score change.
2026-09-24	Score	Freedom 57 to 56	Data Sovereignty 12 to 11: the dimension rests on Venice’s unverified no-storage claim, with no independent privacy audit.
2026-09-24	Data	N/A	Fixed stale ATH (VVV set a new high in Sep 2026), DIEM target (40,000 since 14 Sep) and burn totals (now bound live); attributed no-storage, 14x and throughput claims; privacy-audit votes 517 (Sep 2026). Scores unchanged.
2026-09-23	Data	N/A	Corrected the unclaimed-airdrop burn to 32.5M VVV (BaseScan, 12 March 2025) and removed GPU-provider names Venice doesn’t publish; Infrastructure 9/20 flagged for review.
2026-09-23	Data	N/A	Integrity records re-cut: 14 claims now quote Venice’s own pages verbatim and 9 are our own measurements. Scores unchanged.
2026-09-18	Data	N/A	holder_concentration moved from unverified to measured: the top ten hold 63.37% of VVV raw and 30.72% excluding infrastructure, across 150,671 holders on Base. Scores unchanged.
2026-09-17	Data	N/A	uncensored_inference moved from unverified to established: Venice’s public model API returns 118 text models, 69 of them Venice-hosted open-weight and 49 proxied closed models a third party can withdraw. Scores unchanged.
2026-09-08	Data	N/A	Emissions were stale at the 1 May state (5M/yr with 4M and 3M “scheduled”); the chain has been paying 2.5M/yr since 1 September, with 2M scheduled for 1 October. Re-derived the full seven-step ladder on-chain from total-supply deltas, corrected the burn-coverage denominator and annual inflation (6.3% → 3.1%), no score change.
2026-09-08	Data	N/A	The token-weighted governance we attributed to Venice traced to a help-centre article now behind a sign-in wall with no archive snapshot, while the live launch post lists “No governance” and the public tokenomics FAQ mentions none. Integrity verdict inflated → match, sources re-based to venice.ai, no score change (5/20 stands).
2026-08-31	Data	N/A	DIEM mint-rate tracker rebuilt on actually-paid rates: the deployed staking contract charges a 500-DIEM bucket-top lookup table, not the published continuous formula, so all published rates understated paid rates by ~3-7% (reader-reported against the Venice app quote). Headline rate now the contract’s live getDiemAmountOut quote; no score bearing.
2026-08-03	Data	N/A	Corrected the Kimi K3 privacy tier: Venice’s live model API tags kimi-k3 Private (open-weight, Venice-hosted); the earlier Anonymous framing went stale after Moonshot’s open weights dropped ~26 Jul. Also dropped Grok from the Anon examples (API tags grok-4 Private). No score change.
2026-08-03	Returns	68 → 69	Value Accrual 12→13, resolving the deferred re-examination. On-chain burn strengthened materially (discretionary buyback up several-fold, two per-event streams added, DeFiLlama-tracked burn spend 966K→1.43M annualised). Revenue Sustainability held 13/25 (revenue still self-reported/Delphi-derived, not independently verified). B/C grade held.
2026-07-24	Data + Editorial	N/A	Corrected the burn mechanism (Venice 22 July community call, venicestats-confirmed): per-event burns fire on new subscriptions and, since 17 July, credit purchases, not renewals. Replaced the incorrect active-subscriber/MRR/ARR chart with an on-chain burn-sources chart (sub/credit split attributed to venicestats, not on-chain-derivable), fixed the stale “March ~$119K largest to date” figure, and added call alpha (Kimi K3, inference economics, credit burn, Minds, owned compute). Returns reconsideration deferred to the 1 Aug monthly review: the 2026-05-25 “strengthens the revenue evidence base” rationale is now void.
2026-07-18	Data	N/A	Venice tokenomics update (Odaily/Phemex-corroborated): new 5% VVV buy-and-burn on credit purchases (API included), beyond the per-sub burns; and a DIEM target rise 38,000 → 40,000 staged 3 Aug to 14 Sep, deferring the mint-curve steepening. Value Accrual + DIEM narrative updated. Scores deferred to monthly review; tracker target stays 38,000 until 3 Aug.
2026-07-05	Editorial + Data	N/A	Added the pilot “The product in practice” section (per specs/product-comparison-framework.md) from first-hand use, r/VeniceAI and the Venice Discord; key find is that privacy is a per-model Private/Anon choice in the picker. Also bumped the independent-privacy-audit Featurebase request to 467 votes / second-most-requested. No score change.
2026-07-01	Data	N/A	Venice closed its first external raise: a $65M Series A at a $1B valuation (unicorn), led by Dragonfly with Coinbase Ventures and North Island Ventures. Verified Tier-1 via TechCrunch (1 July 2026); corroborated by Voorhees’s own “VVV and Capital” post. The round is equity in the company, not a VVV token sale, so it does not dilute token holders or add a token supply overhang. Voorhees states Venice is already profitable with >$70M annualised run-rate revenue (self-reported at the raise, not verified; the site’s Revenue Sustainability evidence still treats revenue as unpublished) and that the capital will fund owned GPUs and data centres to replace leased compute. Prose + frontmatter corrected for the now-outdated “self-funded / no external investors” framing while preserving the token-vs-equity distinction (Token Distribution and Supply Dynamics are unaffected: no VVV dilution, no VC token allocation). This reverses the 2026-05-20 “no VC preference stack ahead of VVV holders” Value Accrual framing. The Series A introduces an equity preference stack for the first time, widening the token-versus-equity discount. No numeric score change in this entry; the Value Accrual (12/20) reconsideration is deferred to the July 2026 monthly review (due today, per grade-boundary rule). Downstream NOT yet synced (flagged for that review): research JSON (both 0xBobski_research/venice/ and src/data/projects/VVV_venice.json), podcast Own-Your-Mind-004-Venice, and YouTube paired files (venice.md + youtube-description.md).
2026-05-26	Editorial	N/A	Liquidity & Access prose updated to reflect three new venues added since the 2026-04-10 score bump to 12/15: Crypto.com + Upbit (KRW/BTC/USDT) listed 12 May 2026, eToro listed 13 May 2026, Robinhood spot listed 19 May 2026 (verified via robinhood.com/us/en/crypto/VVV/). Score held at 12/15: the 2026-04-10 bump was driven by Pro Plus + Max tier launches, not exchange count, and exchange coverage was already strong. The Robinhood addition is structurally meaningful for US retail but does not flip the sub-score. No score change.
2026-05-25	Data	N/A	New on-chain paid-subscriber tracker wired into npm run refresh:vvv-burns. Source: Alchemy Base mainnet Transfer(0x01784e...a5ce, 0x0, _) on the VVV contract, tier-classified by USD value at burn time ($1 beta, $2 Pro, $5 Pro Plus, $10 Max). On-chain evidence (steadily climbing daily burn rate over 90+ days, inconsistent with first-signup-only firing) supports interpreting each burn as one active-sub-month (one renewal per active subscription per month). Trailing-30d snapshot at first refresh: ~37,700 active paid subs across tiers, ~1,425 renewals/day, ~$798K subscription MRR (Pro × $18 + Pro Plus × $68 + Max × $200). New <VeniceSignupsChart /> component renders above the article body with tier-stacked monthly bars + MRR strip + Liberman 1:1 API ratio footnote (total ARR estimate clearly labelled as Liberman’s, not verified). New <LiveDataCallout /> placed mid-article links back to the chart. Cross-checked against venicestats.com /api/metrics, drift -0.01%. No score change; Revenue Sustainability deferral from 2026-05-20 still stands pending next monthly review. The new chart strengthens the evidence base for that deferred adjustment by replacing a third-party derivation with a directly verifiable on-chain measurement.
2026-05-20	Editorial	N/A	Page revisions on the back of Yan Liberman’s (Delphi Ventures) Venice writeup, May 2026. Four additions, no score change: (1) Signup figure refreshed from “2M as of April” to “~3.0M by mid-May” with ~300K/month cadence and the underlying point that Venice now publishes daily subscriber data (frontmatter Revenue Sustainability evidence, uncensored-AI section, value-proposition prose, Returns scoring prose all aligned). (2) Daily LLM token throughput trajectory added (~20B/day in early February to ~60B+/day in early May) as a structural growth signal the subscription side alone does not explain. (3) ARR proxy paragraph added to Revenue Sustainability prose citing Liberman’s ~$60M current ARR / ~$200M annualised addition rate derivation, attributed and flagged as third-party derived, not verified. (4) Value Accrual paragraph extended with the “no VC preference stack” structural framing, narrowing (not eliminating) the token-versus-equity discount that normally applies to crypto comps. Revenue Sustainability (currently 13/25) is likely one to two points light in view of the derived ARR base; deferred to the next monthly review per the grade-boundary rule (no B-to-A- crossing). Research JSON usage_metrics + revenue evidence synced. YouTube paired files (venice.md + youtube-description.md) synced. Live YouTube video (rRXvDf-gChw, 24 April 2026, 26 days old) flagged for the substantive-vs-marginal gate; this update is marginal, no regen scheduled. Podcast not regenerated: embedding a derived ARR figure in audio would not survive the evergreen rule.
2026-05-16	Editorial	N/A	Co-founder departure correction. Teana Baker-Taylor left Venice in January 2026 after roughly two years and is now CEO of BasedAI (emerged from stealth 13 May 2026 per PR Newswire / aithority.com; LinkedIn confirms departure). Yesterday’s softening of the “single point of failure” framing was based on her still being COO, which is no longer current. Team Overview, Governance Decentralisation paragraph, and “The risk” block reverted to single-point-of-failure framing with explicit note of her departure and no publicly named replacement COO. Research JSON team section and YouTube paired files updated in parallel. Crunchbase, theOrg and RootData still list her at Venice; do not trust those third-party data sources for current roles. No score change.
2026-05-15	Editorial	N/A	Team Overview risk framing fact-checked after reader pushback. Three corrections, no score change: (1) Team size updated from “~6” (May 2024 launch figure) to “~20” with attribution to LinkedIn employee directory and Tracxn (30 April 2026); launch number kept as historical context. (2) “Single point of failure” softened to “central key-person dependency”. Co-founder Teana Baker-Taylor (COO, ex-Circle VP of Policy, Binance UK Director, Crypto.com GM UK, Chamber of Digital Commerce CPO) is a credentialed second-in-command, though no external investors, no public board and no disclosed succession plan remain accurate. (3) SEC settlement attribution clarified: SatoshiDice 2014 ($50,843) was Voorhees personally; ShapeShift AG 2024 ($275,000, unregistered dealer) was against the company entity per Bracewell/CoinDesk coverage, not Voorhees personally, though he was CEO during the relevant period. Research JSON and both paired YouTube source files (venice.md + youtube-description.md) updated in parallel. Live YouTube video (rRXvDf-gChw, published 24 April 2026) contains the original framing on all three points; flagged for substantive-vs-marginal regen review.
2026-05-03	Editorial	N/A	User count refresh: 1.3M to 2M registered users per Venice’s self-reported April 2026 figure. Attribution preserved. No score change.
2026-05-03	Data	N/A	Per-subscription buy-and-burn mechanic added to Value Accrual evidence (frontmatter and body). As of 27 April 2026: Pro $2, Pro Plus $5, Max $10 burned per new signup (Pro doubled from the $1 launch amount in mid-April). Verified against Venice’s Introducing Programmatic VVV Buy & Burns blog and community on-chain confirmation by @Jpgs_eth. Score unchanged; per-subscription dollar amounts are small relative to the monthly aggregate buyback, but the mechanism deserved documentation.
2026-05-02	Data	N/A	Monthly review pass. (1) May 1 emission cut (6M → 5M annual) executed on schedule. Three-step monthly schedule confirmed: 5M (1 May, executed), 4M (1 June), 3M (1 July). Supply Dynamics dimension paragraph and TokenFactsStrip updated, no score change since trajectory was already priced in. (2) Burn figure correction: April 2026 buyback was ~$111K, not the previously cited ~$123K; March 2026 at ~$119K is the largest to date. Verified on-chain via npm run refresh:vvv-burns (Alchemy Transfer(buyback-burner, 0x0) logs). Editorial framing of “monthly buybacks growing every month” replaced with the actual non-monotonic trajectory ($62K, $97K, $69K, $119K, $111K). (3) Effective supply attribution moved from “42.45% per venice.ai/token” to “42.3% on-chain” using direct Alchemy measurement. (4) DIEM outstanding refreshed 38,182 → 38,773 (~102% of target). (5) Market data refresh: VVV $9.24, market cap $423M, FDV $737M, ATL date corrected 2025-11-21 → 2025-12-01 per CoinGecko. Down-from-ATH softened from ~75% to ~59%. (6) Annual inflation rate updated from 7.6% (at 6M) to 6.3% (at 5M) with projected 5.0% (June) and 3.8% (July).
2026-04-28	Data	N/A	Added burn-vs-emissions coverage ratio to monthly buyback chart and Supply Dynamics paragraph. Coverage computed from on-chain VVV burns (Alchemy Transfer(buyback-burner, 0x0) logs) divided by VVV emissions schedule from Venice communications (8M → 6M → 5M → 3M annual, day-prorated). April 2026: 3.3% coverage, down from 8.4% in Dec 2025. No score change; data-only addition for editorial transparency on net deflationary status.
2026-04-23	Data	N/A	Refreshed DIEM-locked VVV from 6.3M to 8.26M (BaseScan staking + DIEM contracts). DIEM supply now 38,182, past the 38,000 target. Coinbase added DIEM/USD spot pair (CoinGecko markets data). Editorial mechanism description preserved (already correct on burn-to-unlock). Cross-references DIEM tokenomics article rewrite to escrow framing.
2026-04-10	Returns	66 → 68	Pro Plus ($68/mo) and Max ($200/mo) subscription tiers launched; x402 USDC payment rail added on chat/completions. April monthly buyback burn is the largest to date at ~$123K per venice.ai/token. Value Accrual 11→12, Revenue Sustainability 12→13. Burn figure corrected from “42.8% of genesis” to “33.72M VVV burned, 42.45% of effective supply” after BaseScan verification of the 0x0 balance on 0xacFE6019Ed1A7Dc6f7B508C02d1b04ec88cC21bf. Buyback start date corrected from November to December 2025.
2026-04-10	Data	N/A	Verified burn figure against BaseScan (0x0 balance on VVV contract) and cross-checked against CoinGecko effective supply (79.43M). 33.72M VVV confirmed at burn address, matching venice.ai/token dashboard. Monthly buyback burn trajectory confirmed from venice.ai/token dashboard chart.
2026-03-19	Freedom	55 → 57	E2EE and TEE privacy modes launched via NEAR AI Cloud and Phala Network. Data Sovereignty 10→12.
2026-03-12	Returns	64 → 66	Monthly review: emissions cut from 8M to 6M/yr, buyback burns active since Nov 2025. Value Accrual 14→11 (dimension weight rebalance), Supply Dynamics 10→13, Revenue Sustainability 10→12.
2026-03-14	Freedom	57 → 55	Data Sovereignty corrected: policy-based anonymisation (GPU providers see plaintext) scored too high. 12→10.
2025-03-01	Both	N/A	Initial publish. Freedom 57/100, Returns 64/100.