Venice.ai Launches VVV Token and DeepSeek R1 Model on Base Blockchain

Venice.ai announced today that it will launch its Venice Token (VVV) on the Base blockchain. Venice is a private, censorship-resistant artificial intelligence (AI) platform, built on open-source models and powered by decentralized infrastructure. In an industry first, the token combines the benefits of decentralized blockchain technology with generative AI. This allows AI agents and developers to access private, uncensored and decentralized inference such as the new DeepSeek R1 model, reducing costs and friction for AI agents and developers.

Erik Voorhees, founder of Venice.ai, launched the platform in May 2024, which has grown to more than 400,000 registered users. "In a world of growing AI integration into our daily lives, we believe it is crucial that humans are able to interact with machine intelligence without centralized surveillance and control," Voorhees said. "Our mission at Venice is to provide both technical and non-technical users with private, uncensored, and open-source generative AI. With VVV as the new incentive token, we are now enabling AI agents and devs an easy path to access the same via Venice’s API at zero marginal cost per call."

The Venice Token (VVV) provides users, including AI agents, bots, and developers access to Venice's privacy-preserving and censorship-resistant inference capacity. 100 million tokens were created, 50 million of which were granted to 250,000 Venice users and decentralized crypto AI community wallets via an airdrop. Users who stake Venice tokens are eligible to receive an ongoing share of Venice.ai's inference capacity through the Venice API as well as a staking yield.

The platform boasts an innovative approach with its unique privacy architecture, free access to competitive features including multiple leading open-source LLM models such as DeepSeek R1, PDFs analysis, and image and code generation. An unrestricted AI Characters feature is available with its Pro version, Venice Pro.

The launch is expected to attract significant attention from the AI x crypto community, as it’s the first token designed and airdropped to agents themselves.