Venice (VVV)

Great rundown on VVV’s raise today. Kinda necessary. Much better than the usual “sell to VC’s first undisclosed allo and dump your head” model. Bullish imho. Especially bullish for the proper moonshot scenarios, where we are competing with tardfi giants, not crypto shitters.

Is this Venice AI raise bullish or bearish for $VVV? ➡️ Recap: They're selling a bunch of tokens + 9% equity to VCs to scale ➡️ IMO the token portion of the sale doesn't matter much to existing holders. It's highly vested, is mostly a call option, and the cost basis is not at a significant discount to market price ➡️ (It sounds like a pretty bad deal for the VCs tbh so must be a secondary concern for them) ➡️ The equity portion is the eyebrow-raising part. Does Venice plan to go public? And if they go public, what does that mean for token holders? ➡️ On the negative side, having a separate stock price, separate valuation, and separate stock holders creates a juggling act, some confusion, and dilutes token holders. This is the main timeline FUD about the deal ➡️ I lean a bit more positive though. I'd rather hold the diluted token of a massive public company than an undiluted token of a niche business ➡️ The leap of faith is that they'll take care of token holders over time as they scale ➡️ Since the team is crypto native with a long history here, I think they will. They could even potentially give token holders equity like others have done ➡️ The big bet for token holders is less about these details and more whether Venice can become a top AI business over time ➡️ If you don't like the product enough to use it yourself and think it'll just stay a niche business in the space, then don't buy the token ➡️ If you love the product and think it'll become mainstream and a top AI competitor to Perplexity/ChatGPT/etc. then it's a good buy

To my knowledge, this is only the 2nd time in this space that a token has preceded a VC raise. This is the next evolution of crypto. 1) A token first model will be new normal, 2) almost everything which can’t raise after a token launch will die.

"We don't want to sell the token" More like "VCs want to buy equity" You can turn this however you want, and I don't doubt that SOME value will accrue to the token, but there is just an inescapable conflict between equity and token as long as both exist

$vvv raised a series a and ct is celebrating this is very bearish and is your first clue the token will become irrelevant the team will now drive value back to their equity investors only and the more rounds they do the more value goes back token is irrelevant and will not accrete value expect them to get bigger and bigger and raise more and more money while the token goes to zero why would equity investors invest if value will flow to a token they dont have a stake in answer = they wouldnt