Venice AI: The ShapeShift of AI

When Erik Voorhees announced Venice AI's token launch on Base, most people missed the irony. The man who once built ShapeShift to free crypto from

Erik Voorhees, the maverick behind the once-Bitcoin gambling site and later billion-dollar crypto exchange ShapeShift, is now attempting something even more ambitious: liberating AI from centralized control.

When Voorhees announced Venice AI's token launch on Base on May 29, most people missed the irony, but not us. We dove behind the scenes to uncover the story of how Voorhees is now attempting to free AI from centralized control—and sparking a new chapter in the battle between centralized and decentralized tech.

Let's back up. Venice AI, launched in May 2024, isn't just another AI chatbot. Then?

It's an entire platform built on a radical premise: what if you could access the world's most powerful AI models without surveillance, without censorship, and without leaving a trace?

The numbers suggest Voorhees might be onto something.

Since launch, Venice has attracted 400,000 registered users, handles 15,000 inference requests per hour, and maintains 50,000 daily active users.

What makes Venice truly different is its approach to AI access.

Unlike ChatGPT or Claude, which run on their own proprietary models, Venice acts more like a privacy-preserving gateway to multiple AI models.

Want to use Meta's LLaMA? No problem.

Prefer the newly restricted DeepSeek? Venice has you covered.

It's this last point that proved particularly prescient.

When DeepSeek, China's rising AI star, suddenly restricted access to Chinese phone numbers only, Venice became one of the few remaining gateways to what many consider the most advanced open-source AI model.

The timing couldn't have been better – or more suspicious, depending on who you ask.

Before we dive into the controversy that followed, we need to understand exactly how this "uncensored AI" actually works.

Because as with most things in crypto, the devil is in the technical details.

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If Venice AI's promise sounds too good to be true – private, unrestricted access to top AI models without surveillance – that's because making it work required some clever engineering.

The secret sauce? A combination of blockchain technology, decentralised GPU networks, and what Venice calls "abliterated models."

Let's break it down.

First, there's the privacy layer.

Unlike traditional AI platforms that store every conversation on their servers, Venice claims to keep nothing. Your chats stay local, encrypted on your device.

When you switch browsers or devices, your history starts fresh – because there is no central database keeping track.

This raises an obvious question: if everything's local, how does the AI processing actually happen?

Venice routes your queries through a decentralised network of GPU providers.

Each node only sees the immediate request, without any context about who you are or what you've asked before. It's like having a different person handle each sentence of your conversation, with no one seeing the full picture.

Then there's the "abliteration" process – Venice's approach to censorship resistance. They take open-source AI models like LLaMA or DeepSeek and modify them to remove built-in restrictions.

Here's where critics have raised valid concerns: if you're removing AI safeguards, what prevents misuse?

Venice's answer is a tiered system.

Free tier: Basic safeguards remain

Private tier: More flexibility, with 20 daily prompts

Pro tier ($18/month): Full access to unrestricted models

The platform offers access to an impressive array of models.

OpenAI's GPT variations

Anthropic's Claude

Meta's LLaMA

The controversial DeepSeek

Various specialised coding models

Each model can be selected based on your specific needs – a luxury not offered by most AI platforms.

Perhaps the most innovative aspect is how Venice handles the economics of AI computing.

This is where the VVV token comes in, and where things get really interesting.

When Venice AI launched its VVV token on January 28, 2025, it did something unusual in crypto: it skipped the presale.

Instead, 50% of the total 100 million tokens went straight to the community through an airdrop.

The distribution looked clean on paper.

50% to community (airdrop)

35% to Venice company (partially vested)

10% to Venice Incentive Fund

5% for liquidity development

It's what happened next that got everyone's attention.

The VVV token took just 90 minutes to hit a fully diluted value of $1 billion after its January 27 launch, before pushing even higher to