Coinbase has announced the listing of the Base chain AI concept token Venice Token (VVV), whose market capitalization reached a record of $2.3 billion at the time of the announcement, and still stands at $1.6 billion as of the time of writing.
Venice has no public financing background, and its user base is not particularly large compared to mainstream AI applications. Why was it able to be directly listed on Coinbase? Odaily will analyze Venice's business, airdrop rules, and token economics in this article.
What is Venice (VVV)?
Venice is a permissionless, private, and censorship-resistant AI platform, whose mission is to provide private, unmonitored AI inference services for users. Venice states that based on OpenAI's various AI products, OpenAI permanently stores every conversation, allowing it to be accessed, cracked, or sent to the NSA or CCP. Venice was created to solve this problem, and it also supports functions such as conversation, image generation, and code creation, but does not view, store, or restrict any user data (including Prompts, conversations, and generated content).
(Note: NSA refers to the United States National Security Agency.)
Since its launch in May 2024, it has accumulated 400,000 registered users, 50,000 daily active users, and processes 15,000 inference requests per hour. (Note: For comparison, ChatGPT has about 300 million weekly active users, and Douban has 50 million monthly active users.) Today, January 28, Venice opened its API to the public for use by AI Agents, developers, and third-party applications, and launched the VVV token, airdropping it to 250,000 addresses. The airdrop details are covered in the next section.
Venice Airdrop Rules
This airdrop will allocate 50 million VVV to two types of users, accounting for 50% of the initial supply:
- Venice users, who must have at least 25 credits by December 31, 2024, and have been active on October 1, 2024.
- Specific token holders, including VIRTUALS, AERO, DEGEN, AIXBT, GAME, LUNA, VADER, CLANKER, MOR, and 200 Coinbase Agentkit developers.
The airdrop claim deadline is March 13, 2025, and can be claimed directly through the official website.
Venice Computing Power Rules
Typically, AI applications like OpenAI's ChatGPT and Anthropic's Claude have two modes: a free terminal version and a paid API version, with the latter charging based on the number of tokens used. (Note: Tokens can be simply understood as the number of input and output characters.)
Venice, however, provides a new model, where users can obtain AI usage rights by staking tokens to obtain computing power.
Venice has set a standardized unit called VCU to measure the computing power required for AI inference, and the proportion of VVV tokens staked by users determines their daily available VCU (e.g., holding 1% of the total stake entitles them to 1% of the total VCU capacity). As Venice's infrastructure expands, the total VCU capacity will increase, and users' daily inference capabilities will grow even without additional staking.
Venice Token Economics
The initial supply is 100 million VVV, allocated as follows:
- 50% for user and community airdrops
- 35% allocated to Venice.ai
- 10% for incentive fund
- 5% for providing liquidity
VVV has an inflationary mechanism, with an annual issuance of 14 million VVV (initial inflation rate of 14%, decreasing annually), to incentivize staking and network expansion. Venice states that this model allows stakers to use the API for free, and the staking rewards cover the costs, resulting in "negative-cost" usage. This claim is valid if the token price does not further decline or fluctuate significantly, but the actual number of real users, token demand, and development prospects of Venice are currently unknown. According to the official document, unstaking requires a 7-day waiting period with no rewards and no token withdrawal, and users participating in token staking should consider this carefully.
