How a Privacy AI Token Went From $0.92 to $34 in Nine Months

Points of Focus

• VVV, a privacy-focused AI token rose from a December low of $0.92 to a record $34.51, pushing its market capitalization close to $1.6 billion.
• The AI platform reported millions of users and daily API calls, while annualized revenue climbed more than $70 million.
• VVV’s annual emission rate is set to fall about 86% from its original level, while token burns and revenue-funded purchases add further scarcity.

In December 2025, Venice AI’s VVV token traded as low as $0.92.

Nine months later, it hopped to $34.45 pm on September 21, 2026 before dropping slightly to $31.47 as of September 25 at 7.54 AM UTC. 

The more than 3,000% jump pushed VVV’s market capitalization close to $1.6 billion and made it the third-largest AI-focused cryptocurrency by market value.

It is a kind of rally that would usually invite a regular explanation: speculation.

But VVV’s rise also coincided with measurable changes underneath the token. Venice’s annualized revenue climbed from more than $70 million in July to a reported $100 million in August. API activity reached millions of calls per day. Meanwhile, token emissions were repeatedly reduced and revenue-funded purchases began removing VVV from circulation.

The question is how much of the rally reflects those fundamentals and how much reflects a tightening supply meeting one of crypto’s strongest narratives: private AI.

Venice grew while VVV rallied

Venice was founded in 2024 by crypto entrepreneur and ShapeShift founder Erik Voorhees around a simple premise: users should be able to interact with artificial intelligence without surrendering their conversations to a centralized platform.

To protect privacy, the company does not log prompts and stores all user conversations locally on their devices. It provides access to more than 200 AI models spanning text, image, video, and audio generation.

By July, Venice reported 3.5 million registered users, 1.3 trillion tokens processed monthly, and 2 million developer API calls per day, with peak volume exceeding 2.1 million.

Revenue grew rapidly alongside platform adoption.

Venice secured $65 million in its first-ever external funding round, led by Dragonfly at a $1 billion valuation, to expand its private, unrestricted AI platform worldwide. 

That commercial traction gives VVV something many narrative-driven AI tokens lack: an operating business against which its underlying economics can partly be evaluated.

However, VVV is not equity in Venice. Its connection to the underlying business functions on a completely different model.

VVV turns capital into AI compute

Venice launched VVV in January 2025 with 100 million tokens.

Users can stake VVV for platform benefits and lock staked tokens to mint DIEM, a separate token representing AI capacity. One staked DIEM provides $1 of Venice API credit per day.

The mechanism effectively connects capital to compute:

Users first acquire and stake VVV, which allows them to mint DIEM. The DIEM they receive can then be used to access AI inference capacity on Venice. 

This gives VVV identifiable utility beyond governance or speculation.

It also creates a potential link between Venice’s growth and token demand. If developers need more private inference capacity, staking VVV can become more useful.

But that link isn’t automatic. Venice also accepts conventional payments, so more API usage does not necessarily translate directly into equivalent VVV buying.

Revenue climbed as token supply tightened

The supply side changed sharply as Venice expanded.

VVV launched with annual emissions of 14 million tokens. By September 2026, Venice had reduced the annual rate to 2.5 million, with another cut to 2 million scheduled for Oct. 1.

It represents an approximately 86% reduction from the original launch rate.

Burns removed another large chunk of supply.

In July, according to Venice, 33.7 million VVV had been burned, equivalent to roughly 42% of the original 100 million tokens. Much of that resulted from burning unclaimed airdrop tokens, so it should not be confused with tokens bought from investors using operating revenue.

But Venice has also connected actual business activity to ongoing burns.

Every $100 of API credits purchased now triggers $5 of VVV buying and burning. New subscriptions generate additional programmatic purchases ranging from $2 to $10 depending on the subscription tier.

Since July 17, $5 of every $100 spent on Venice API credits has automatically gone toward buying and burning VVV, while new subscriptions trigger additional purchases of $2 for Pro, $5 for Pro+ and $10 for Max. Venice AI also conducts separate discretionary revenue-funded buybacks. 

On Sept. 8, the company carried out what it described as its largest such burn to date, worth about $391,000. Even that transaction equaled only about 0.02% of VVV’s approximately $1.6 billion peak market capitalization, based on the reported burn value and VVV’s September peak valuation.

That creates a measurable economic loop:

As paid usage increases, more VVV is purchased and burned, reducing the token supply available to the market. 

It doesn’t prove the mechanism caused a 3,000%-plus rally. But rising revenue occurring alongside falling issuance creates a materially different setup from an AI token whose price depends solely on narrative.

$1 billion business meets a $1.6 billion token

Venice’s July fundraising provides another useful benchmark.

The company raised $65 million at a $1 billion equity valuation in its first outside financing, led by Dragonfly with participation from Coinbase Ventures and others.  

At its Sept. 21 peak of $34.51, VVV’s market capitalization approached $1.6 billion. The supply adds another dimension to that valuation: As of Sept. 29, 2026, CoinMarketCap reports about 48.5 million VVV circulating against 81.07 million in total supply, implying a fully diluted valuation (FDV) of approximately $2.8 billion at the current price.

Those numbers aren’t directly comparable.

Equity represents ownership of Venice. VVV represents access to a tokenized compute economy and does not give holders ownership of the company.

But the divergence raises an important valuation question.

If Venice’s equity investors valued the operating company at $1 billion in July, what exactly were crypto markets valuing at $1.6 billion in September?

Part of the answer may lie outside conventional business metrics.

Privacy became a tradable AI narrative

Venice’s core differentiator is privacy rather than ownership of a leading frontier model.

This proposition gained unusual visibility in September amid debate over whether sensitive prompts submitted to centralized AI platforms could expose users’ ideas or research.

The sharp rise in the price of VVV indicates that investors were trading VVV not simply as an AI token. They view the token as a proxy for the idea that AI privacy itself could become valuable infrastructure.

Voorhees’ background reinforces that positioning. The ShapeShift founder has spent years advocating privacy and individual control in crypto.

VVV packages those familiar crypto principles into a newer market: AI inference.

$1.6 billion market cap comes with a catch

Market capitalization can make VVV’s rise look broader than it necessarily is.

Data demonstrates that the 100 largest VVV wallets control approximately 98% of token supply. However, this figure should not be interpreted as 100 whales controlling nearly all VVV. The largest-address cohort includes protocol contracts, burned tokens, treasury-related holdings and exchange custody addresses, meaning a single address can represent assets belonging to many users. The concentration figure therefore measures where VVV sits onchain, not the beneficial ownership of the tokens. 

While large addresses may include staking contracts, exchanges, treasury allocations and other infrastructure rather than individual whales, freely traded supply is important.

Market capitalization multiplies circulating tokens by the latest market price. It does not mean $1.6 billion of fresh capital entered VVV.

When much of a token is staked, locked or concentrated, relatively smaller amounts of incremental buying can potentially move the market price substantially.

This means VVV’s rally can support two interpretations simultaneously.

Venice has developed measurable business activity: millions of users and API calls, rapidly growing revenue, a $1 billion institutional valuation and token economics increasingly tied to paid usage.

At the same time, emissions have collapsed from their original rate, tens of millions of tokens have been burned and ownership remains highly concentrated.

VVV’s rise from $0.92 to $34.51 therefore isn’t simply a story about AI hype. This is not a conventional price-to-sales multiple: token holders have no equity claim on Venice’s revenue and the company has not disclosed how it calculated the run-rate figure.

VVV has measurable fundamentals – growing usage, reported revenue and utility tied to AI compute – while supply cuts and burns add scarcity. The test now is whether demand for private AI can generate enough sustained token utility to support that valuation.

It is an experiment in whether growing demand for private AI computes can support a token whose scarcity is increasing almost as rapidly as the business underneath it.

The next test is whether usage can keep growing fast enough to justify the price scarcity helped create.