In mid-September Venice seemed to have found its perfect narrative: the VVV token at an all-time high and a frontier model available anonymously. The following week reminded everyone that narrative and price rarely walk together.

Sonnet 5.5, leaving no trace

On 28 September the official AskVenice account announced Claude Sonnet 5.5 on the platform, “available anonymously”. The model card confirms the substance: an anonymised privacy tier, prompts neither stored nor used for training, execution in a hardware enclave, a one-million-token context window. The price is $3.75 per million input tokens and $18.75 per million output tokens. It is the same model Anthropic made available on its own API the same day, under a different label: there it is a product, here it is a product without a dossier.

The price corrects, usage does not

VVV touched its all-time high of $34.51 on 21 September, then pulled back. On 29 September, according to market data, the token was worth about $26.31: down roughly 16% on the week and almost a quarter below the peak. Alongside the fall, the @venicestats account reported sign-ups at record highs. The figure finds no confirmation in an official source, but an account tied to Venice spoke of record daily sign-up revenue — around $406,000 — earlier in the month, while founder Erik Voorhees claimed an annualised revenue run-rate of $100 million. It is worth keeping the two things apart: the token price is one variable, platform usage another.

Emissions: let’s line the numbers up again

In recent days a claim circulated that VVV’s annual emissions had been “cut by 40%, from 10 to 6 million”. It is an outdated reconstruction. The official schedule — Venice’s blog of 5 August 2026 and the Token Transparency Filing published on Blockworks — tells another story: 14 million at launch, then 10 (20 August 2025), 8 (23 October 2025), 6 (10 February 2026), 5 (1 May 2026), 4 (1 June 2026), 3 (1 July 2026), with a cut to 2.5 million from 1 September and to 2 million from 1 October 2026. The figure of “250 billion tokens a day” does not hold: at 3 million a year we are talking about roughly 250,000 VVV a month. On this point, the gap between what circulates on social media and what the documentation says remains the most useful piece of news.

Conclusion

Whether the VVV/DIEM model gets imitated by other ecosystems is a suggestive market thesis, but it cannot be verified today. What can be verified is more sober and more interesting: a platform that has committed itself by contract to reducing supply, and a token that, for one week, did the opposite. The distance between those two movements is exactly the space in which an infrastructure project gets judged.

Verified sources: venice.ai/models/claude-sonnet-5-5 e docs.venice.ai/models/overview (consultate 29/09/2026); blog Venice “Credit Burns and a Higher DIEM Supply Target” (05/08/2026); Blockworks Token Transparency Filing, Venice Token 2026 H2; dati di mercato VVV da CoinStats e CoinMarketCap (29/09/2026); Cryptopolitan, massimo storico VVV (21/09/2026); CoinGabbar e Phemex su ricavi e iscrizioni (settembre 2026); TechCrunch e The Block, 3 milioni di utenti e profitabilità Q1 (01/07/2026).