There are weeks when a token’s price says little and the product says everything. This is one of them for Venice: VVV is travelling around 22 dollars, down a few percentage points over 24 hours, while the company stages two very different operations — a Halloween campaign and the closing phase of a film festival.

The Halloween drop

On 17 October the official account posted: “The scariest thing you’ll hear this year? ‘I’m sorry, I can’t help you with that.’” It is the platform’s positioning — private, unrestricted AI — turned into a joke and into a campaign. The drop is live on venicebazaar.com. A simple message, and it says a lot about how Venice wants to be perceived: not a technical alternative, but a question of freedom of access.

Lumara: cinema made with AI

The more ambitious front is Lumara, the independent film festival presented by MoonPay and Venice. Its first edition drew more than 700 submissions from around the world; the six finalists and sixteen nominations were announced on 16 October. The jury weighs three things: the strength of the idea, the quality of the storytelling and how the filmmaker uses AI. The awards night is set for 26 October at the Roxy Hotel Cinema in New York, with up to 100,000 dollars and 10 million Venice credits on the table. It is a concrete way of moving the conversation away from what models can do and toward what they produce.

The burn nobody sees

On the token side, community analytics reports a record burn of 22,955 dollars generated by subscriptions and credits, which would have beaten the previous high from 2 September. It is worth being precise: that figure is calculated by an independent account, not by Venice. The mechanism, however, is verifiable and documented — 5 dollars for every 100 spent on API credits go into buying and burning VVV on the open market, on top of the burns tied to Pro, Pro+ and Max subscriptions. Watch out for a common misunderstanding: of the roughly 33.9 million VVV burned in total, the vast majority comes from the one-off burn of 2025, not from revenue. For supply to actually contract, the revenue burn has to exceed the 2 million VVV of annual emissions. Today it does not.

The macro picture remains solid but not euphoric: market capitalisation around 1.08 billion dollars and protocol TVL on DefiLlama at about 1.54 billion. The interesting point, as one user notes, is that someone can pay Venice without knowing the token exists — and still generate demand for VVV. That is a healthier starting point than the one many AI tokens have, whose only customer is the next buyer.

Verified sources: official @AskVenice post, Halloween drop (17/10/2026); lumarafilmfestival.com and MoonPay press release, Lumara finalists (16/10/2026); venicestats.com/burns and @venicestats post (16/10/2026); CoinGecko and Bybit, VVV quote (18/10/2026); DefiLlama, Venice protocol TVL (18/10/2026) — consulted on 18/10/2026.