Originally published at mrnasdog.com/research/vvv/inflation
Venice Token has cut its staking emission three times in three months — from 14M VVV a year at launch to 3M since Jul 1 2026 — yet VVV is still the most inflationary kind of asset the framework tracks: an uncapped token that mints new supply every day. Over the last 90 days about 2.03M VVV reached the market against only 0.06M bought back and burned, for +4.17% net; our supply monitor reads +3.70% over the same window. Venice AI is building toward net deflation, but on the measured numbers it is not close yet.
The verdict, in one paragraph
For the 90-day window ending Jul 16 2026, the MrNasdog Pressure Framework reads Venice Token at +4.17% net on the last-90-day view and +3.39% forward. Sell pressure totalled 2.03M VVV against 0.06M of buy pressure, on a circulating base of 47.3M VVV. Our supply monitor reads the realized last-90-day change at +3.70%, putting the gap at 0.47 percentage points — the two readings agree. VVV is structurally inflationary on a falling curve: the emission is being cut aggressively and on schedule, the team vest ends in January, and the revenue buyback is real — but today new supply still outruns destroyed supply by more than fifteen to one.
Sell pressure: where new VVV comes from
Sell #1 — protocol inflation — is about 1.11M VVV over the last 90 days, falling to roughly 0.74M forward. Venice Token has no maximum supply: new VVV is genuinely minted, and the raw on-chain supply on Base rose from about 113.26M to 114.37M across the window. Every newly minted VVV is paid to stakers as yield, which is the entire point of the design — staking VVV produces sVVV, and sVVV can be locked to mint DIEM, a token that grants $1 a day of Venice API inference credit for as long as it is held. DIEM is what makes Venice Token unusual, but it does not change this row: locking sVVV to back DIEM shifts 20% of a staker's yield to Venice, so DIEM redirects who receives the emission rather than how much is created. What has changed is the rate. Venice cut the emission from 6M a year to 5M on May 1 2026, to 4M on Jun 1 2026, and to 3M on Jul 1 2026. That final step is confirmed on-chain: the trailing two weeks minted 8,219 VVV a day, which annualises to exactly 3M. The announced reduction programme ends there — no fourth cut has been announced — so the forward window is projected flat at the 3M rate.
Sell #2 — vesting unlocks — is about 0.92M VVV, and it is the larger half of the sell ledger going forward. Venice reserved 10M VVV at genesis for the team, released a quarter of it at launch on Jan 27 2025, and streams the remaining 7.5M out in a straight line over 24 months, finishing Jan 27 2027. That is a published schedule with no cliff, so the framework projects it by date rather than by trailing average: about 0.92M per 90-day window, with roughly 2M still unvested today. It runs through this window and the two after it. Sell #3 — Foundation and unscheduled unlocks — is zero, because no team-controlled wallet showed an observed release inside the window. Sell #4 — long-term locked or bankruptcy — is zero; there is no estate or court-ordered distribution attached to VVV.
Buy pressure: where new VVV goes
Buy #1 — programmatic buyback — is about 0.06M VVV, and it is the only thing on this side of the ledger. Venice spends part of its platform revenue buying VVV on the open market and sending it to the burn address, where the coins are destroyed permanently. This is genuinely trackable: the burn address rose from about 33.72M to 33.78M over the window, which is the 62K VVV the framework books, and the programme has bought back and burned roughly 241K VVV in total since its first firing in late 2025. It is worth being precise here, because the number is widely misread. The often-quoted 250,000 a month figure is not the burn — it is the emission at the 3M-a-year rate, and it is the target Venice wants its burns to exceed. Measured on-chain, burns are running near 21K a month, so the buyback currently removes only a small fraction of what the protocol mints. Buy #2 — protocol fee burn — is zero: nothing is destroyed automatically when VVV moves or when the API is used. Buy #3 — Foundation buy — is zero, because Venice's open-market purchases are the revenue buyback already counted above and are not double-counted. Buy #4 — new long-term lock — is also zero: the staking contract grew by 0.96M VVV over the window while 1.11M was minted into it, so the growth is yield accumulating rather than coins being bought and locked away, and unstaking clears in a 7-day cooldown.
Foundation and overhang
Roughly 33.3M VVV sits outside the circulating count, and almost all of it is team-controlled. The largest piece is the Venice AI company treasury, which still holds over 30M VVV — more than a third of the counted supply — on no published release schedule; Venice has publicly stated it does not intend to sell it, but capacity is not the same as commitment, so the framework tracks it rather than trusting it. Behind that sits the 10M incentive fund from genesis, also unscheduled. New this quarter is a third overhang: Venice closed a $65M Series A led by Dragonfly at a $1B valuation on Jul 1 2026, and its investors received a 1.5M VVV grant plus warrants for up to 5M more over eight years. Both are locked for one year and then vest linearly across the following three, so none of that 6.5M can reach the market before Jul 1 2027 — it is a real future overhang and a zero for this window. These tokens come out of Venice's existing treasury rather than new mint. All three overhangs are re-read on each refresh, and the rule is simple: if any of their balances falls between refreshes, the outflow enters Sell #3 at the next refresh.
How VVV compares to other AI and compute tokens
Structurally, Venice Token belongs to the same family as an exchange token, not a layer-1. It has no cap and no block subsidy; it has a company that earns real revenue selling a product and spends part of that revenue buying its own token back and burning it. That makes the natural comparison a token like BNB or a quarterly buy-and-burn exchange token, where the deflationary force is revenue-funded and discretionary rather than protocol-encoded. The difference is which side is currently winning. A mature exchange token typically burns far more than it issues, so it prints a negative net; VVV still mints 3M a year against burns near 250K a year, so it prints a clearly positive one. The DIEM mechanic is Venice's attempt to change that arithmetic by making the token a claim on inference capacity rather than a yield instrument.
Against uncapped continuous-emission layer-1s, VVV looks better on trajectory and worse on control. An emission curve written into protocol code cannot be changed without governance; Venice's emission is set unilaterally by the company, because VVV is a utility token with no governance rights and holders do not vote on emissions, burns or treasury. That cuts both ways. It is why the emission could fall from 14M to 3M a year in eighteen months, faster than any DAO would move — and it is why nothing stops it from rising again. And against a hard-capped chain like Bitcoin or Cardano, the comparison is simply that VVV has no ceiling at all: the discipline is a policy, not a constraint.
What to watch in the next 90 days
First, the monthly burn size, which is the single number that decides whether Venice's deflation thesis is real: burns must climb from roughly 21K a month to above 250K for supply to start shrinking, a twelve-fold increase that the $65M Series A is partly meant to fund by growing revenue. Second, whether a fourth emission cut is announced — the 6M-to-3M programme completed on Jul 1 2026 and nothing further is scheduled, so the forward read assumes 3M a year holds. Third, Jan 27 2027, when the team vest finishes and about 0.92M per 90 days — more than half the current sell ledger — falls away permanently. Fourth, Jul 1 2027, when the Series A grant and warrants begin vesting and add up to 6,000 VVV a day if the warrants are exercised in full. Fifth, the Venice treasury balance of over 30M, which has no schedule and only a stated intention behind it.
Summary
The MrNasdog Pressure Framework reads Venice Token at +4.17% net over the last 90 days and +3.39% forward, in agreement with our supply monitor at +3.70%. VVV is an uncapped token that mints new supply daily to stakers, and although the emission has been cut aggressively to 3M a year and the team vest ends in January 2027, new supply still outruns the revenue-funded buy-and-burn by more than fifteen to one. The key risk is that the deflation thesis depends on revenue growth, not on protocol code: burns must rise roughly twelve-fold to overtake issuance, and the same company that cut the emission can raise it again without asking anyone. There is no ceiling on VVV supply — only a policy, and a trajectory that is genuinely bending the right way.
MrNasdog Pressure Framework analysis of VVV, Metric 1 — Inflation. Data + explanation only. Not financial advice. Updated Jul 16 2026.
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