The story of AI applied to crypto had a September in the spotlight, and Venice’s token was one of its lead players. The question that matters, though, stays open: how far apart are a rally and a solid business model?

Grayscale’s report

On 2 October Grayscale published a note signed by Zach Pandl: its crypto sector tied to artificial intelligence gained 54% in September, against 24% for the broader market. NEAR led with +183%, followed by Venice (VVV) at +70%, World (WLD) at +47% and Bittensor (TAO) at +37%. Despite the performance, the AI segment remains the smallest of the asset manager’s six sectors, with a market value of roughly 15 billion dollars.

VVV’s numbers

On the market, VVV hovers around 27-28 dollars, with a market capitalisation of about 1.34 billion and daily volumes in the tens of millions. These figures fit the picture Grayscale describes: a token that has run, but whose scale stays modest when set against the sector’s big names. September’s growth, after all, comes after months of a far more compressed price, a sign of how much narrative weighs on valuations.

Narrative and substance

This is where the debate gets interesting. Part of the community observes that the crypto-AI wave is, for now, a bet on future infrastructure more than on revenue proven at scale. Grayscale itself says so plainly: the use cases — payments between agents, identity, private computation, verifiable data — are potential, not demand already established. The point is not whether AI will need blockchain, but whether today’s tokens will capture that value or remain a speculative proxy.

Conclusion

For Venice the stakes are clear: turning attention into real use. A 70% rally in a month tells you about the market’s enthusiasm; the ability to tie that value to a product — private inference, a credit economy, a token with a function — is what separates a fad from a long-term thesis.

Verified sources: Grayscale (note by Zach Pandl) via Crypto Times, news.bitcoin.com and Yahoo Finance, 2-3 October 2026; VVV market data from CoinGecko and Bybit, consulted on 4 October 2026. Note: the protocol’s TVL value reported by the radar (about 1.92 billion dollars) could not be verified unambiguously and is therefore not carried over into the text.