There's a audio version of this blog post, hosted on YouTube:
With the Venice ecosystem splitting into 2 tokens, the Venice Token, ticker VVV and a new token, ticker DIEM, I asked myself the question “IF I had some dry-powder, which token should I buy?”
DIEM is tokenised compute. A fixed amount of compute. One dollar of compute per day. If you squint, you could view DIEM a little like a stable coin in some ways. You don’t buy a stable coin unless you need it. You don’t buy a stable coin to speculate on its value. I mean sometimes you might, if the stable coin has de-pegged but that is a rare event and you know you’re playing with fire! I think it’s going to be similar with DIEM. After initial volatility DIEM going to find a fair market price, which is going to be a function of quality of AI that Venice can provide and the market cap of DIEM should be a function of how much AI firepower Venice has to it’s name, i.e. how many GPUs Venice has a claim to. DIEM shouldn’t wildly fluctuate. Noone would want it to. It should be boring, eventually. You want your utility tokens to be boring I think. I should say DIEM is not a stable coin, officially it’s a “range-bound perpetuity” - I’m just lumping the 2 together to demonstrate DIEM is different from a token like ETH where the value is more about the future value (i.e. the vibes) than based on fundamental utility today. DIEM should have limited upside and limited downside, if it works as expected. It’s designed not to moon and not to crash.
To hammer the point home that you shouldn’t buy DIEM expecting it to moon - I wouldn’t be surprised if the price of DIEM trends ever so slightly down in the fullness of time, by design. The price of DIEM might be a function of Moore's law. As GPUs get better, compute gets cheaper - $1 of compute should go further. You may need less DIEM to get the same amount of thinking done. On the other hand, GPUs don’t get cheaper in time, they just get better! I expect the appetite for thinking time will be voracious. And of course $1, the denominator, doesn’t stay $1 in terms of purchasing power, it loses value at 2% per year. Hmmm, too many variables. I need to give more thought to what I think the shape of the DIEM chart will look like over the years …
Meanwhile, back at the ranch… after saying DIEM could be viewed similar to a stable coin, let's get back to the question: “Which token should you buy if you want the upside of what Venice stands for?”
The answer is simple, buy Venice Token (VVV). Most people can ignore DIEM. Most people can pretend it never existed and still be fully invested in the upside of private and uncensored Artificial Intelligence. VVV existed before. VVV will exist after. If you’re staked, there is nothing to do. You do not need to click a single button. You will not have any kind of downside if you’re on holiday right now and don’t even know there is a change. There is no reason to worry. Everything is fine. I’m not doing anything myself. The Venice team have done a great job at upgrading in a minimally disruptive way. VVV is basically backwards compatible.
If you’re a software Developer building an application that needs to get AI prompts answered, and you’ve selected Venice as your AI provider, you’re going to need DIEM. But honestly, still, the answer is to buy Venice Token. I would buy $VVV and mint DIEM so you get your AI access AND have the upside of also getting ongoing yield. By the way, Venice is honouring historical API access for 30 days. You do need to take action, but you do not need to rush.
If you’re a user of AI tools, for example an AI wingman such as Goose, or a code editor like VS code with a AI code assistant plugin and you want your AI to be private or to access uncensored models, then you’ll need an API key and you need DIEM to use that API key. But I think the same logic as for Developers can be used. Buy $VVV and mint your own DIEM. And enjoy ongoing yield.
So who should buy DIEM?
- Traders that spotted something is over-valued or under-valued.
- Arbitrage managers trying to make money balancing supply and demand.
- Liquidity providers trying to make money in trading fees from the arbitrage of VVV vs DIEM.
Probably these use-cases are the same people. In either case. If you’re buying DIEM, without planning to use the Venice API, then it’s similar to you buying a Stable coin hoping to make money on a de-pegging event. You might be playing with fire. Ask yourself, Do you have an edge over others? Are you the smartest person in the room? If not, you could be the exit liquidity. The people who have the edge are the ones who know how many GPUs (or Akash tokens, ticker AKT), Venice HODL. Those folk can estimate the fair value of DIEM accurately.
The recent mega pump in VVV probably means the market is agreeing with me. VVV seems to be the play.
I’m keeping it simple: I’m DCAing into VVV. Staking it. HODLing. I’m fading DIEM for now. But I will prepare a bucket of popcorn to watch the show in 2 days time (20th August 2025). I do expect winners and losers. I don’t think we’ll get the same kind of fireworks as the launch of $VVV. I still can’t believe the mania that priced VVV near $23. Markets can be wild!