Venice, founded by Erik Voorhees, with a mission to provide permissionless access to private and uncensored machine intelligence, opens its API to the public for AI agents, devs, and 3rd party apps, and launches the Venice token, VVV, also on Base, with an airdrop to over 250,000 people and AI agents this morning

Venice, a privacy-focused generative AI platform founded by former ShapeShift CEO Erik Voorhees, has opened its developer API broadly to AI agents, developers, and third‑party applications while simultaneously launching its native Venice token (VVV) on Coinbase’s Layer‑2 network Base. Venice was originally launched in 2024 as a private, uncensored AI assistant built on open‑source models, offering text, image, video generation and web search through a consumer chat interface and API, with a design that keeps conversations locally in the browser instead of on company servers. The project positions itself as an alternative to centralized AI platforms, emphasizing permissionless access, minimal content filtering, and crypto‑native payment and access models. As part of the token launch, Venice has conducted a large‑scale airdrop of VVV to over 250,000 wallets and AI agents, distributing ownership and access rights widely across its user and developer base, with the token acting as an access token for AI inference capacity rather than a conventional payments token. Built on Base with an initial supply of 78 million VVV, the token can be staked to receive a pro‑rata share of Venice’s API compute (measured in an internal unit called Diem), effectively tying access to AI resources to on‑chain token holdings. By opening its API publicly and tokenizing access, Venice is attempting to create a more decentralized and market‑driven model for AI infrastructure, where permissionless agents and applications can tap into private, uncensored AI capabilities secured and rationed via crypto‑economic mechanisms.

✨ AI-generated background, compiled from web sources — not editorial content.

More coverage

• Venice AI - Projects & Protocols | IQ.wiki (iq.wiki)
• What Is Venice AI? The Privacy-Focused Chatbot - Cryptonews.net (cryptonews.net)
• Venice AI Review: I Used It for 2 Weeks—Here's What Happened! (aidetectplus.com)
• Venice | Private AI for Unlimited Creative Freedom (venice.ai)
• Changelog - Venice.ai (featurebase.venice.ai)

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