Venice AI token surges to $1.6B in value

Venice AI, a startup focused on privacy-centric artificial intelligence, has achieved a remarkable milestone with its newly launched token, VVV (CRYPTO:VVV).

The token reached a fully diluted value of over $1 billion within just two hours of its launch on January 27.

As of now, VVV's total value stands at approximately $1.65 billion, with a market capitalisation of $306.4 million after releasing 25 million tokens from a total supply of 100 million.

The Venice Token allows users to gain private access to DeepSeek’s AI model, offering ongoing inference capabilities for generative text, images, and code without censorship.

Founded by Bitcoin (CRYPTO:BTC) advocate Erik Voorhees, Venice AI operates on the Ethereum layer-2 Base network.

The platform has already attracted over 400,000 registered users since its inception in May 2024, processing more than 15,000 inference requests per hour.

In a recent post, Venice AI highlighted that purchasing and staking VVV tokens grants users free access to its API for private AI services.

DeepSeek’s R-1 model, which is touted as competitive with ChatGPT while being open source and requiring less computational power, has generated significant interest in the market.

However, concerns have arisen regarding DeepSeek's data collection practices.

Voorhees addressed these concerns by stating that when using R-1 through Venice, “none of it is going anywhere.”

The token distribution includes allocations for early Venice users and specific Base users, with no presale offered to outside investors.

Venice AI's approach emphasises decentralisation and privacy, aiming to provide users with an alternative to conventional AI platforms that may impose centralised controls.