Morning Minute is a daily newsletter written by Tyler Warner . The analysis and opinions expressed are his own and do not necessarily reflect those of Decrypt.
Sep 3 Sep 4 Sep 6 Sep 8 Sep 10 $81.8k $80.3k $78.8k $77.4k 24h High High $79,701 24h Low Low $77,833 Vol Vol $1.1B Market projections Odds by Myriad Today $78,000 to $80,000 $78k–$80k 52 % chance This week Above $78,000 Above $78k 54 % chance Price data by CoinGecko CoinGecko More Bitcoin news and projections → 🔒 A Fight Over an AI Math Proof Made the Case for VVV and Private Inference
VVV jumped 34% on Tuesday to $24.77 on a massive spike in volume. The catalyst? It was a public dispute between an NYU mathematician and OpenAI over credit for fluid dynamics proofs.
The details are messy and contested, and the mathematician has said outright he isn’t accusing anyone of misusing his data while OpenAI has denied accessing it. But the question that spread across X and Hacker News was simpler than the dispute itself: could a researcher’s private conversations with a chatbot end up informing a competitor’s work? Nobody has shown that happened. The point is that a large number of people found the question plausible.
That’s the argument Venice has been making since January 2025. The project is Erik Voorhees’s, the ShapeShift founder, and the pitch is an AI platform where prompts stay on the user’s device rather than sitting on a company’s servers. They rely on open-source models, with no content filtering and no account required.
The VVV token works as an access key rather than a governance chip. Stake VVV, receive a proportional share of daily API inference capacity. A second token, DIEM, is minted by locking staked VVV and delivers $1 per day of API credit in perpetuity. Emissions have been stepped down repeatedly, from 14 million a year at launch to 2.5 million as of September 1, with 2 million scheduled for October, and a portion of revenue buys VVV on the open market and burns it. Venice said in August it passed a $100 million annualized revenue run rate, up from $70 million a month earlier.
Now, back to why this story matters. It’s clear that privacy is a major narrative this cycle. Zcash’s ZEC token just broke out of a 9-year range to new ATHs over $1,200 and many are calling it to run to 0.1 BTC this cycle. The reason is an increase in the need for wealth privacy as politicians roll out things like billionaire taxes. Now, the case for private AI (inference) is becoming stronger. Any whiff that the frontier labs are taking ideas from their users and leveraging for their own discoveries will receive pushback at the highest levels. And a crypto protocol offers a strong alternative (with a product already backed by big revenue). It’s a strong narrative headed into the next bull cycle, and VVV likely just cemented itself on the “top alts to watch” list for the next few years.