Venice is Burning

The annual Venetian festival, La Festa del Redentore, has been occurring for almost 500 years. It features an extravagant fireworks show, lighting up the lagoon and drawing crowds along the timeless canals.

In that spirit of fiery celebration, we now mark the end of the Venice airdrop.

Over the past 45 days, 17.4 million VVV tokens were claimed by over 40,000 people. The token is now broadly dispersed, and Venice’s next phase can begin.

To those who are just hearing about it, what does this VVV token do? The Venice API is free for any human or agent who stakes VVV, meaning zero-cost generative AI for private and uncensored text, image, and code.

Now that the airdrop is over, what will be done with the unclaimed tokens?

The unclaimed supply—a third of total VVV supply, worth roughly $100,000,000—was burned today at dawn.

Transaction:

https://basescan.org/tx/0xf5a19b79b13274faf19c46b404a36699990cad18e907aece0ab26671ff4a37af

As conveyed at launch, 2.5% of token supply was unlocked for the team at genesis. 1% was sold on launch day, with our blessing.

After perps markets opened (i.e. leveraged shorts), several social media accounts spun this into a negative narrative against Venice. Combined with the sell pressure from the ongoing airdrop, a casual cynic could be forgiven for getting the wrong impression.

Venice has sought no VC funding.

Venice engaged in no pre-sale or OTC deals.

Venice paid no KOLs for their affection.

Venice stands alone in this among its peers.

But to resolve any lingering doubts about our commitment to the importance of unrestricted intelligence — Venice bought back the 1% of VVV that was sold, and these, too, were burned at dawn.

Transaction:

https://basescan.org/tx/0x9d0007242ccdd4ad12c5aa293e92a304eea202f55e0b437d9fa1ac6286aa8147

Proof of Work: Venice improvements since token launch

In the past 45 days, Venice has continued shipping features every day. This is public in our change log with more detail available here:

Model Releases

• DeepSeek R1 Models in the API

• Qwen 2.5 VL 72B

• Qwen QwQ-32B

• Deepseek Coder V2 Lite (beta trial)

• Mistral Codestral 22B (beta trial)

• Lustify SDXL

Image Features

• Image Inpainting

• Sticker Factory

• Multi-image Generation

• Upscale Options

• Increased Prompt Length

App Features

• Venice Voice - Text to Speech

• Venice Voice Downloads

• Prompt History Navigation

• Account-Level Safe Mode

• Telemetry Controls

• Extended Context Windows

API Features

• Autonomous Key Creation

• API Integration Guides for Cursor, Cline, VOID, Roo AI, Brave Leo AI, and ElizaOS

• Akash Eliza Template

• VCU Allocation Optimization

• Immediate VCU Access

• Characters available in API

• API Dashboard

• USD Billing on API

• API Key Expiration

• API Key Consumption Limits

• Function Calling Support

• Web Search Support

• API Documentation Overhaul

• 120+ other code updates

New Venice Branding

For the past few months, we partnered with Asimov Collective to design a comprehensive design language, a visual identity inspired by mankind’s timeless quest for knowledge; the pursuit of unrestricted intelligence.

Check it out now live on our website.

What’s Next

We like to build and ship, rather than levy promises and roadmaps.

But here’s a taste of what’s on the horizon: Venice’s new image engine, social feed, native mobile app, agentic Characters, and some powerful updates to VVV tokenomics.

The API will continue to approach feature-parity with the app, and usage is growing. You can find historical VCU usage here, and learn more about VCU here.

Venice ensures humanity has access to unrestricted machine intelligence, providing users with private, uncensored access to state-of-the-art open-source AI models.

To those who have been enjoying the app, thank you for taking a chance on us early. Join our Discord to meet other Venetians and chat with the team.

To those learning about us for the first time, Venice is available without an account, at Venice.ai

ad intellectum infinitum

- The Venice Team