Morning Minute: Venice’s VVV Token Soars After OpenAI Dispute

Morning Minute is a daily newsletter written by Tyler Warner. The analysis and opinions expressed are his own and do not necessarily reflect those of Decrypt.

GM!

Today’s top news:

• Crypto majors rebound 1-3%, alts soar; BTC +2% at $79.5k
• VVV soars 40% to $27 and new ATH on OpenAI dispute; ZEC & LIT +10% to new ATHs
• Strategy buys no Bitcoin, adds $176M to STRC; STRC at $97.94
• Pump.fun revenue rebounds as Solana tokens reclaim market share lead
• Stonkfun eco soars as Stonk pops 50% to $200M

🔒 A Fight Over an AI Math Proof Made the Case for VVV and Private Inference

VVV jumped 34% on Tuesday to $24.77 on a massive spike in volume. The catalyst? It was a public dispute between an NYU mathematician and OpenAI over credit for fluid dynamics proofs.

The details are messy and contested, and the mathematician has said outright he isn’t accusing anyone of misusing his data while OpenAI has denied accessing it. But the question that spread across X and Hacker News was simpler than the dispute itself: could a researcher’s private conversations with a chatbot end up informing a competitor’s work? Nobody has shown that happened. The point is that a large number of people found the question plausible.

That’s the argument Venice has been making since January 2025. The project is Erik Voorhees’s, the ShapeShift founder, and the pitch is an AI platform where prompts stay on the user’s device rather than sitting on a company’s servers. They rely on open-source models, with no content filtering and no account required.

The VVV token works as an access key rather than a governance chip. Stake VVV, receive a proportional share of daily API inference capacity. A second token, DIEM, is minted by locking staked VVV and delivers $1 per day of API credit in perpetuity. Emissions have been stepped down repeatedly, from 14 million a year at launch to 2.5 million as of September 1, with 2 million scheduled for October, and a portion of revenue buys VVV on the open market and burns it. Venice said in August it passed a $100 million annualized revenue run rate, up from $70 million a month earlier.

Now, back to why this story matters. It’s clear that privacy is a major narrative this cycle. Zcash’s ZEC token just broke out of a 9-year range to new ATHs over $1,200 and many are calling it to run to 0.1 BTC this cycle. The reason is an increase in the need for wealth privacy as politicians roll out things like billionaire taxes. Now, the case for private AI (inference) is becoming stronger. Any whiff that the frontier labs are taking ideas from their users and leveraging for their own discoveries will receive pushback at the highest levels. And a crypto protocol offers a strong alternative (with a product already backed by big revenue). It’s a strong narrative headed into the next bull cycle, and VVV likely just cemented itself on the “top alts to watch” list for the next few years.

🌎 Macro Crypto and Markets

• Crypto majors are green up 1-5%; BTC +2% at $79.5k; ETH +2% at $2,510; SOL +2% at $104; HYPE +5% at $86.70; ZEC +9% at $1,264
• Top alt movers include VVV (+38%), NEAR (+14%) and LIT (+6%); both VVV and LIT hit new ATHs on the day
• Oil +1% at $95; Gold +0.2% at $4,450
• Stock futures are red as oil continues rise; DOW -0.6%, Nasdaq -0.5%
• Visa is pairing VisaNet settlement data with onchain lending tools to help fintechs and stablecoin card programs borrow working capital, with its own stablecoin settlement volume now running above a $20 billion annualized rate
• Cronos rolled back 10,961 blocks to reverse $111.2 million tied to the Tectonic exploit, erasing one hour and 54 minutes of settled transactions including activity unrelated to the attack, with $9.19 million still gone
• Blockstream is negotiating with the Liquid hackers for the remaining 598.5 BTC worth about $47 million, after they returned 3,400 of the roughly 4,000 BTC drained from the sidechain
• The Ethereum Foundation set a December 2029 deadline to make transactions, validators, and data storage quantum-resistant, with five hard forks planned after next year’s Hegotá upgrade at roughly one every 7.2 months

Corporate Treasuries & ETFs

• The Bitcoin ETFs saw $47M in net outflows on Tuesday; the ETH ETFs saw $24M in outflows
• Strategy bought no Bitcoin in the week to September 7 and spent $176.3 million repurchasing STRC instead, a week after ending a two-month drought, while doubling its credit securities buyback authorization to $2 billion
• Bitmine bought 28,086 ETH last week, worth about $70 million, lifting holdings to 5.93 million ETH, roughly 4.9% of supply, with 85% staked and annualized staking revenue projected at $330 million
• Strive added 1,375 BTC for $109 million at an average of $79,281, lifting holdings to 24,531 BTC, with 70% of last week’s capital raised through SATA preferred stock now at $999 million notional

Meme Coin Tracker

• Meme leaders were mostly flat; DOGE +2%, SHIB even, PEPE +3%, PENGU even, TRUMP even, SPX -2%
• Robinhood chain leaders were mostly flat; Pons +7% to $540M; AI -5% at $225M; Cashcat +3% at $185M; ZZZ +300%, Orbio +110%, Ubik +33% and astro +300x were top movers
• Solana had a big day led by Stonk +50%, Useless +30%, and Cate +75%; Ansem -3% at $175M
• The Stonkfun ecosystem tokens soared on the back of Stonk popping 50%, with KNOTS and PURR taking the 2 and 3 spots behind ZCAT and several tokens up 2-4x

💰 Token, Airdrop & Protocol Tracker

🚚 What is happening in NFTs?

• NFT leaders were mostly flat; Punks even at 30 ETH, BAYC even at 6.8 ETH, Pudgy even at 3.7 ETH
• Quotrons (+17%) and Templars (+57%) led top movers