Venice AI's VVV token touched an all-time high of $34.51 on September 21, pushing its market cap to near $1.6 billion and making it the third-largest AI-focused cryptocurrency. The rally follows a privacy dispute involving OpenAI, a jump in Venice's revenue, and repeated cuts to new token issuance.
VVV extends its 2026 surge
Venice AI's native token, VVV, hit a fresh all-time high of $34.51 on September 21, up roughly 17% in the past 24 hours. The token has climbed around 3,000% since bottoming out at $0.92 last December. Its market cap now sits near $1.6 billion. That makes it the third-largest AI-focused cryptocurrency, trailing only Near and Tao.
VVV is not a spending token — it works as the access key to Venice AI, a private chatbot and image generator founded by ShapeShift's Erik Voorhees. Instead of billing per prompt the way ChatGPT does, Venice lets users stake VVV to claim a daily share of the platform's inference computing. Locking staked VVV mints a second token, DIEM, which hands holders a dollar's worth of API credit every day, and Venice uses part of its revenue to buy VVV on the open market and burn it, shrinking supply over time.
Privacy pitch fuels rally after OpenAI dispute
Earlier in September, a public dispute broke out between an NYU mathematician and OpenAI over credit for a fluid-dynamics proof, raising a question that spread fast on X and Hacker News: could a company that reads user prompts eventually fold those ideas into a competitor's research? VVV jumped 34% in a single day on the speculation alone, as traders bet on Venice's no-logs, no-account model.
Revenue growth and shrinking supply
Venice said it had crossed a $100 million annualized revenue run rate in August, up from $70 million a month earlier. That followed a $65 million Series A led by Dragonfly at a $1 billion valuation in July. Coinbase Ventures also backed the round. Annual token issuance has been cut from 14 million VVV a year at launch to 2.5 million as of September 1, with a further cut to 2 million scheduled for October.
Trading activity has followed: VVV's 24-hour trading volume exceeded $151 million following the all-time high, while only about 48.4 million of an eventual 81 million total VVV supply is currently circulating.
Concentration risk remains
The rally carries a warning sign. Market data shows the 100 largest VVV wallets control roughly 98% of the supply, meaning a handful of holders can swing the price more than any wave of retail buying. Venice also does not train its own frontier model — it routes prompts to open-source systems like Llama and DeepSeek, which trail OpenAI's and Google's top models on most public evaluations.
Sources: Decrypt, Crypto Briefing
Trading involves risk.
Risk Disclaimer
