Nerdy tokenomics post...
Venice released an experimental token design for accessing AI compute back in Sept, called DIEM
Staking DIEM grants access to any AI model on Venice for free (1 DIEM = $1 of renewing daily credits): it makes the marginal cost of compute free.
At first, it was API access only (no web), and only a few open-source models.
In Oct-Nov we allowed its use on the Venice web app (no longer API only), and then started adding all the leading external AI models to Venice.
Today, users can access Claude Open 4.5, Gemini 3, Nano Banana Pro, GPT 5, etc from Venice. This is both convenient (all the models in one interface), but also provides additional privacy (pseudonymity vis-a-vis Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, etc). These models are unequivocally the best in their respective categories.
Meanwhile Venice's userbase (both app and API) has continued growing.
And now we're seeing the tokenomics of DIEM start to play out... seven consecutive weeks of green candles amid a sideways or down broa