Erik Voorhees Discusses Plan to Hand Venice’s VVV Token to Loyal Users

The Venice founder said the rewards program, which he called unannounced and undeployed, is part of a wider push to make the token deflationary and eventually “burn all the tokens in existence.”

Erik Voorhees said Venice, his private, uncensored AI platform, is preparing a rewards program that would take a slice of users’ payments, use it to buy VVV on the open market, and give the token back to customers who stick around. He described the plan on Unchained’s Uneasy Money podcast on Aug. 20, and said it had not shipped: “announced or deployed yet, but I’ll convey it,” he said.

The idea is to turn paying users into token holders without asking them to buy in. It amounts to “buying loyalty,” Voorhees said, and lets customers who stay “end up with a stake in the thing” without paying for it.

The plan is separate from Venice’s existing mechanism, which uses subscription and API revenue to buy VVV and permanently destroy it. The new program would give the token to users instead of burning it, in a bid to keep paying customers on the platform.

Sell the equity, keep the token

Voorhees cast the rewards idea as part of a wider effort to shrink VVV’s supply. Venice aims to “burn all the tokens in existence,” he said, a goal its recent investors had to accept. He called it a “very unorthodox financial strategy.”

When Venice raised a $65 million round led by Dragonfly at a $1 billion equity valuation, which Voorhees announced in July, it chose to sell equity rather than tokens. “We have equity and we have tokens. We have a bunch of both. Which one do we want to sell?” Voorhees said. “Let’s sell the equity,” he added. “we’ll keep the tokens.”

Why he says the two don’t clash

Voorhees argued that equity and token holders are aligned, because the company and its team hold more VVV than anyone. “Burning tokens, is that harming our equity holders? No,” he said. “I’m the biggest equity holder of all.”

The comments land in a running debate over whether tokens are second-class to equity. Venice has said it crossed $100 million in annualized revenue, and is betting that giving its token away can build loyalty even as it works to make the supply shrink.

Related Listen: The Chopping Block: Erik Voorhees on AI Privacy, Agentic Payments, and Crypto x Memecoin Mayhem