Updates
The Equity vs Token Drama: Venice Edition
VVV was CT's golden child.
The poster boy of the AI x crypto narrative. It 14x'd off its December bottom, and half the timeline (me included) spent May hunting for "the next VVV."
But now, CT accuses Venice of betraying its tokenholders.
What happened? On July 1, Erik announced Venice's first outside capital ever: a $65M Series A led by Dragonfly at a $1B equity valuation. Coinbase Ventures, F-Prime, and North Island joined the round.
The business earns it. Venice runs $70M+ in annualized revenue, turned profitable in Q1, serves 3.5M registered users, and processes 1.3 trillion tokens of inference a month. Erik's claim: measured by revenue, it's the largest company at the intersection of AI and crypto.
VVV pumped >9% on the news to around $13.40.
But CT still thought it a bad deal for $VVV holders. This deal introduced a new equity layer that’ll extract value from tokens.
Is that true? Let's dig in.
Quick 80/20 on what VCs bought for $65M:
- A vesting grant of 1.5M VVV (~$20M at current prices)
- 8.98% of the company (equity, valuing Venice at $1B. Remember $VVV MC is ~$1.5B.)
- Warrants to buy 5M more VVV at ~$13.30, exercisable over 8 years. Full exercise sends another $66.5M to Venice
- Everything's locked for a year, then vests over three
- Total possible VC token exposure: 6.5M VVV, ~8.1% of supply. If the warrants get exercised, Erik estimates ~6,000 VVV/day hitting the market, ~0.2% of daily volume
Erik saw the backlash coming. His announcement thread also doubles as a defense brief.
1. "We sold equity so we didn't have to sell your tokens."
Venice still holds its entire 30M+ VVV treasury and has sold exactly zero through a 700% YTD rally. The VCs paid market price (~$13.30) for their token exposure and wait four years to touch it.
Erik argues this reduces sell pressure. But I’m sure the $VVV holders would’ve preferred that potential sell pressure over the equity layer.
2. "The capital makes the burns bigger."
Venice rents compute today. The $65M builds owned datacenters, which fattens margins, which leaves more revenue for the thing VVV holders care about most: buybacks and burns.
3. "Everyone now needs VVV to win."
The token is the most valuable asset on Venice's balance sheet. If VVV bleeds, the equity bleeds with it. The new shareholders are aligned with holders by construction.
Solid arguments. CT still wasn't buying it.
The bear case
The bears aren't attacking the terms. They're attacking the structure.
1. Two owners, one pie.
A dual structure creates two competing classes of stakeholders with no clear boundary on who captures the value. Shareholders get Delaware law. Token holders get a pinky promise.
VCs can and will sell their tokens. And when the two interests inevitably diverge, the value will go to the equity layer.
2. The potential burns don't justify a competing equity layer.
Erik's defense leans hard on bigger burns. Look closer at them.
Venice has burned 33.7M VVV, 42% of the original supply. Sounds massive, except ~99.5% of it was a one-time event: torching 32.6M unclaimed airdrop tokens in March 2025.
The recurring engine is small. Only new subscriptions burn VVV automatically:$2 for Pro, $5 for Pro+, $10 for Max, and renewals burn nothing. That produced ~$166K in April. Every other burn is discretionary. The company picks the number, month to month.
Meanwhile, VVV still emits 3M tokens a year to stakers: ~250K minted every month against ~45K burned. To out-burn emissions at today's price, Venice would need to torch ~$40M a year, over half of everything it makes.
And that discretionary burn budget now runs through a board that owes fiduciary duty to shareholders. Every dollar burned for token holders is a dollar not reinvested for equity.
Now, there are people who argue tokens aren't like equities, and an equity raise shouldn't be considered bearish. But I don't buy that argument.
Overall, the terms are good for $VVV. But the structure itself makes it a bad deal for $VVV holders.
Sponsored by Stacks
Bitcoin Yield Without Handing Over Your Keys!
$BTC just sits there. For a lot of holders, it's a dumb rock that earns nothing.
Earning yield on it has always come with a catch: you hand your Bitcoin to someone. A custodian. A bridge. A wrapped token. More yield, more counterparties who can lose your coins.
Stacks, the leading Bitcoin L2, is building the version where you don't have to.
The vision: Native Bitcoin Staking. Stake BTC on Bitcoin L1, earn your yield in BTC, keep your coins under your own keys the whole time. No bridge. No wrapper. No custodian holding the bag. It's coming soon, and the resource center breaks down exactly how it works.
This isn't some untested mechanism, either. It's an upgrade to Stacks' Proof-of-Transfer, live since January 2021, which has already paid out 4,200+ BTC to stackers. Four years of plumbing behind it.
What's live today? Dual Stacking.
Native staking isn't here yet, but you don't have to sit on your hands until it lands. Dual Stacking is a separate product, running now, paying up to 5% APY in sBTC (Stacks' Bitcoin-backed asset on the L2).
Put your Bitcoin to work.
Narrative
The Robotics Narrative: An Intro & Watchlist
Robotics is crypto's most obvious blind spot.
In 2016, it wasn't even a category investors tracked. Now it's the 2nd biggest in private markets, ahead of fintech, at $263B. Q1 alone did $16B across almost 500 deals.
Here's what almost nobody in crypto is pricing in...all that capital is about to hit a wall the traditional financial stack can't get past.
A robot can't open a bank account. It can't hold a legal identity, sign a contract, or get paid through ACH. Every rail in TradFi assumes a human sits behind the transaction. That works when a person signs for a few thousand machines. It breaks when millions of them start transacting on their own.
Robotics routes through crypto because crypto is the only stack ever built for non-human actors:
- Permissionless identity a machine can hold without a passport or a corporation
- Programmable payments that settle machine to machine, no bank in the loop
- Machine-readable ownership, so an asset can belong to something that isn't a person
- Coordination between autonomous agents with no legal entity in the middle
You could always make the argument that Robotics doesn't need crypto. But I've always focused on following where the world's attention and hype lies, and Crypto tends to find a way of monetizing that mindshare.
Where I'm looking
Here's who's building those rails, grouped by the layer of the stack they're solving. Not a buy list btw...just a watchlist of which piece of the machine economy each one is going after.
• Coordination. Virtuals (@virtuals_io) runs the biggest AI agent ecosystem and is now pushing those agents into the physical world. Its Eastworld robotics track covers teleop data, simulation, and real robot deployment. 50k+ agents recently got access to 430+ tokenized equities through Ondo / Treasures.
• Location. Robots are useless without precise positioning, and GEODNET (@GEODNET) supplies it. 21k+ stations across 150+ countries, roughly $6.7M in annualized revenue and $5.3M in annualized holder revenue through buybacks and burns.
• Identity and payments. Fabric (@FabricFND) handles the backend: machine identity, wallets, payments, and task coordination. Plumbing for a world where machines transact onchain without a human in the loop.
• Telemetry. IoTeX (@iotex_io) has been grinding on DePIN and machine data for years. Device identity, verifiable offchain compute, real-world machine data. Not flashy, but it's what matters when robots need telemetry anyone can trust.
• Spatial. Auki (@AukiLabs) is building Posemesh, a spatial awareness network that helps robots, smart glasses, and other devices understand the physical spaces around them.
• Ownership. xMAQUINA (@xmaquina ) wraps physical AI exposure in a DAO. Fractional machine ownership and robotics deals that normally sit behind VC rounds, backed by an $18M treasury with $7.6M set aside for robotics investments.
• Simulation. Strike (@StrikeRobot_ai) works on humanoid autonomy and sim-to-real training. They recently rebuilt a real Eastworlds lab inside a simulation to test whether behaviors trained in sim survive contact with the real world.
• Training data. Caspius (@caspius_ai) is after embodied AI data. Robots learn from real-world task footage, and Caspius just hit an ATH in footage contributed while adding NFT/account pairing.
• Tooling. Roba (@Roba_Labs) wants to make robotics easier to build around. No-code tools, simulation, robot templates, a creator marketplace, and compute for training and inference.
The catch
I'm not going to pretend this is a rotation you front-run next week. Most of these are early, thinly traded, and completely dependent on physical AI actually scaling. If robots stall, these rails don't matter yet.
But the capital is already moving, and it's moving toward a category that structurally needs crypto rails to work. I'd rather map this corner early than chase it once it's obvious.
🚀 DeFi Catalysts
Lighter has given a couple of tokenomics updates. It includes the burning of the tokens brought back using revenue.
Robinhood launched the mainnet of Robinhood Chain. It claims to be the "AI-native chain to bring RWAs onchain".
Symbiotic has launched Core V2. It brings shared collateral to insurance, credit, and tokenized assets.
dYdX has launched itself as "Arcus", a DEX on Robinhood Chain. It'll give traders 24/7 access to 95 tokenized stocks and perpetuals.
Morpho is powering Robinhood Earn, a product that aims to provide risk-adjusted yield on idle balances using USDG, a dollar-pegged stablecoin.
Pump.fun says they've brought back and burned ~$3 billion worth of $PUMP in the last seven days alone.
Ethena announced its integration with BlackRock. Among other things, USDe will be integrated into BlackRock's Aladdin platform.
Drift Protocol has rebranded to Velocity and is preparing to launch a private beta as it rebuilds its Solana perp exchange.
World is the newly launched prediction market on Solana. They're using Chainlink as the primary oracle infrastructure.
TermMax launched TermPrime on Canton Network. TermPrime is a permissioned fixed-rate lending venue for KYB’d institutions.
Sophon Chain has shut down its ZK L2 on Ethereum. They're going "all-in" on apps that they'll build on Base. Their first product is Pyre.
Pumpfun removed the Tokenized Agent launch option after community pushback that it increased the PvP nature.
Citrea launched the cBTC yield vault with Noon Capital. The return is powered by an automated looping mechanism between deposited cBTC and Noon's native USN stablecoin strategy.
📰 Industry News
Base MCP is now available on Perplexity Computer.
Open Standard, a massive coalition of ~150 finance companies from Visa to BlackRock, announced a new stablecoin: Open USD.
X (formerly Twitter) has announced a hosted MCP for X/Twitter. AI agents with MCP capabilities can now access Twitter directly.
Galaxy reduced their odds of CLARITY Act passage in 2026 to 50-50 due to the Senate calendar tightening and a lack of progress in negotiations.
0x launched a CLI Tool. It allows users & their agents to swap & bridge tokens from your terminal.
Story Protocol has transitioned to DATA Foundation. They're pivoting from general intellectual property infrastructure to AI training data.
🐦⬛ X Hits
- Airdrop opportunities on Solana.
- Decentralized inference deep dive.
- Mental model for compute markets.
- Will Open USD overtake USDC?
- Value capture in tokenization.
😂 Meme
Until next time,
Edgy
Today's email was written by Edgy and Yayya.
DISCLAIMER: I'm NOT a financial advisor. This content is for education and information purposes only. Crypto and DeFi are risky and speculative. Please do your research before investing.
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