OpenClaw Backs Venice.ai, Token VVV Surges Over 500% in One Month

Original | Odaily (@OdailyChina)

Author | Ding Dang (@XiaMiPP)

Last week, the Openclaw founder's advice for young people to "not waste time on cryptocurrency" stung the crypto industry. This week, however, the situation has taken a subtle turn. In the official OpenClaw documentation, Venice.ai, a crypto project with a native token, was quietly listed as a recommended model provider. Over the past month, the price of Venice's native token VVV has also risen from a low around $1.5 to a high near $8.4, a maximum increase of over 500%.

On one hand, there's discouragement; on the other, there's integration. Why has OpenClaw specifically pushed a project with a crypto token economic structure to the forefront?

Venice's Origins: What Happens When a Crypto OG Does AI?

To understand Venice, one must first understand OpenClaw's positioning. It is an open-source, self-hosted AI agent platform that can integrate with chat software to become a user's 24/7 personal assistant, helping with tasks like sending/receiving emails and managing calendars. However, OpenClaw itself does not provide large language model (LLM) capabilities; it is merely an "execution and routing layer." The real intelligence (thinking, planning, generating responses) must come from external model providers.

Venice is a generative AI platform focused on privacy and censorship-resistance, positioning itself as a decentralized version of ChatGPT. The project launched in May 2024 but has not undergone any fundraising, has no VC rounds, and was entirely bootstrapped by its founder, Erik Voorhees.

Erik Voorhees himself is a crypto OG, having entered the industry in 2011. After the Mt. Gox collapse in 2014, he founded ShapeShift, one of the earliest trading platforms to emphasize non-custodial and privacy-first principles. In 2021, he chose to transition ShapeShift to DAO governance, completing its decentralization. His career trajectory seems to revolve around "reducing reliance on trust in centralized structures."

Another key figure on the team is Teana Baker-Taylor, with an impressive resume having held executive roles at HSBC, Circle, Binance, and Crypto.com, responsible for operations and compliance. Most other team members remain anonymous or low-key. According to current public data, the Venice team consists of approximately 20 members.

OpenClaw currently has 22 model providers, including major tech companies like Amazon, Anthropic, and Cloudflare. In terms of scale and brand, Venice is clearly not the most prominent, perhaps even the most inconspicuous. Yet, it was the model provider highlighted and recommended in the official documentation that also featured a native token economy. However, this might have been a documentation merge error; the highlight has since been removed, but Venice was already on OpenClaw's model provider list earlier.

Nevertheless, why would OpenClaw choose such a small, unremarkable company? The answer is simple: Privacy.

After all, alongside AI's great success, controversies surrounding AI-related data leaks and model training continue to accumulate. Users are beginning to realize that the real risk isn't whether the model is "smart," but whether data or information "will be leaked."

So, how exactly 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 user content—prompts, responses, generated images, uploaded documents—on any Venice servers at all. This data is only encrypted and saved locally on the user's own browser (or device). Once you clear your browser data or manually delete chat history, this content is permanently gone.

Venice also explicitly states it does not use user data for model training, does not log, and does not analyze behavior. This stands in stark contrast to mainstream platforms (like OpenAI, Anthropic), which often store conversations long-term for model improvement or compliance review.

Furthermore, Venice distinguishes between Private and Anonymized modes with different privacy strengths. The former offers maximum privacy, using open-source models that run on decentralized GPUs, processing without any identity-linked information. Even if underlying compute nodes briefly see plaintext prompts, Venice itself cannot see or access user history. In the latter mode, underlying providers can see prompt content, but Venice strips all metadata (IP, account fingerprints, historical associations), preventing them from tracking user information.

Therefore, although Venice may not be the most prominent name on the provider list, its privacy architecture made it the "privacy-first choice" specially highlighted in OpenClaw's documentation. Currently, OpenClaw's default model is Llama 3.3, but Erik himself suggested in a reply that users switch to the smarter GLM 4.6.

What does this mean for Venice itself?

OpenClaw is currently experiencing viral growth, with its call volume entering an exponential growth phase. With OpenClaw's official endorsement, Venice's inference capacity demand could be pulled to a new level. This means Venice is undergoing a qualitative change. It is no longer just "an AI project with a crypto background," but is attempting to become the default privacy backend for the mainstream open-source Agent ecosystem.

According to the latest data Erik released on March 1st, since the beginning of 2026, Venice's API user count has begun to surge rapidly, now exceeding 25,000 users.

Token Model: One-Time Investment, Lifetime Compute

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

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

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

After minting, DIEM can be traded on secondary markets like Aerodrome or Uniswap. Alternatively, it can be staked to activate spending credits. DIEM represents a permanent, ownable AI compute asset. 1 DIEM = $1 worth of Venice API credit per day, usable for calling all of Venice's models (text generation, image/video generation, code, etc.), including the highest privacy, censorship-resistant models in Private mode. This credit is permanently valid and automatically renewed daily during your staking period, equivalent to a permanent AI subscription voucher.

The concept of $1 credit is abstract. Within the Venice ecosystem, because it's not a fixed "number of tokens," but rather $1 worth of consumable inference resources. More expensive models generate less content per credit; cheaper models generate more. This abstracted pricing makes DIEM a "compute share voucher." I asked Venice's AI to quantify the $1 credit for me:

Because traditional AI APIs operate on a pay-per-use basis, costs can explode exponentially for high-frequency, long-term, automated tasks (like an AI Agent making hundreds or thousands of calls daily). However, Venice, through DIEM, completely颠覆 this into a one-time investment for long-term fixed quotas. Currently, 1 DIEM is worth approximately $670. Once staked, it automatically grants $1 worth of API credit daily. To facilitate comparison between whether buying DIEM is more cost-effective or traditional pay-per-use is better, I used Grok to generate a rough table:

As the data above shows, for low-frequency users, purchasing DIEM is completely unnecessary. For medium to high-frequency users who need to run Agents daily, generate large amounts of content, and use it long-term, the marginal cost continues to decrease, giving DIEM a clear advantage.

Some users have already shared their experiences. One claimed that staking 56 DIEM allows them to use the Claude Opus 4.6 model all day, with a principal investment of less than $10,000.

Moreover, community users have already developed a credit rental marketplace where unused credits can be sold: cheaptokens.ai. A compute ecosystem 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 pure growth asset, carries the platform's overall valuation narrative, directly benefiting from positive flywheels like user growth, network effects, and ecosystem expansion. DIEM, as a permanent subscription-type utility asset, genuinely serves product usage and value consumption, handling the daily interaction and task execution consumption logic.

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

Supply and Deflation: The Real Background of the Price Surge

According to data from Venice's official website, the current total token supply is 78.84 million. Of these, 7.89 million are locked, and 30.60 million are staked, resulting in a high staking rate of 38.8%. The circulating supply is only 44.34 million. In the initial economic model, the total VVV token supply was 100 million, with 50% allocated for community airdrops targeting early Venice users, AI project teams, etc. The airdrop claim window lasted about 45 days. Ultimately, over 40,000 people claimed 17.40 million VVV, accounting for about 35% of the community allocation. The remaining unclaimed portion, approximately 32.68 million tokens worth about $100 million at the time, was permanently burned by the team's decision to reduce circulating supply and enhance scarcity.

Starting in October 2025, Venice announced a reduction of the original emission plan from 10 million VVV/year to 8 million VVV/year, simultaneously launching a monthly revenue buyback + burn mechanism. The current monthly burn capacity is 30,000 to 50,000 tokens, worth approximately $60,000 to $90,000. Currently, 42.71% of the token supply has been burned. Then, in early February 2026, the official announced another emission reduction plan, cutting from 8 million VVV/year to 6 million VVV/year. This series of adjustments directly changed supply expectations. Looking at the token price performance, this was also the starting point for VVV's rise.

Therefore, VVV's上涨 is not driven purely by narrative, but by a combination of changing supply structure and growing demand.

Conclusion

As AI becomes the central narrative of our era, is Crypto truly fading into the background? Venice is attempting to provide its own answer. If future intelligent agent systems require privacy backends, if Agents need long-term stable compute structures, then perhaps crypto logic hasn't disappeared after all.