Methodology

The instrument

One DIEM entitles its holder to $1 of Venice.ai API credit per day, refreshed daily, indefinitely, while the holder stakes it. DIEM is minted by locking staked VVV (sVVV) at an on-chain mint rate and burned to unlock that collateral. The desk treats DIEM as a stream of daily compute credit and VVV as the collateral asset behind it.

In plain words

Think of DIEM as a coupon book. Whoever holds one DIEM gets a fresh coupon every day, good for one dollar of Venice's AI service that day. Use it and it was worth using; skip a day and that day's coupon dies. Someone who cannot use the coupons can rent the book out and collect a share of what the renters actually use. The desk's question for DIEM is simple: what would a careful person pay today for that endless stream of daily coupons? The answer turns on two things: how much of each coupon really gets used, and how confident you are that Venice is still here in five years. Those are the $u$ and the $r$ in the formulas below, and the desk shows you both dials instead of hiding them.

VVV is the key that makes new coupon books. Lock staked VVV in the machine and it mints DIEM at a posted rate. That gives VVV one provable value: the coupons one key can mint, valued the desk's way. That number is a floor, roughly what the mint window alone justifies, and VVV trades far above it. The extra is what buyers pay for things the desk cannot check on the chain: future buybacks, the chance the rules improve, plain optimism. The desk does not call the extra wrong; it calls it unmeasured, and it shows the gap every day.

Everything on this site follows one rule: measure, do not guess. Every number states its formula and where each input came from. When an input is missing, the chart shows a gap instead of a guess. When the desk must assume something, the assumption is written down next to the number it touches.

Why this is not like Terra/Luna

Terra's stablecoin promised a fixed dollar and printed fresh LUNA for anyone who redeemed, so a run minted trillions of new tokens and crushed the price. DIEM makes no dollar promise: its price floats, and if you bought DIEM on the market you cannot redeem it at all; only the original minter can. Burning DIEM mints nothing; it only unlocks collateral that was already sitting in the vault. The loop that killed LUNA needs a fixed promise plus printing on demand, and this system has neither. That is a fact about the plumbing, not a promise that the tokens will hold their price.

Desk metrics

Implied yield

In plain words: if the daily coupons were certain to keep coming forever, the price you paid works out to a yearly interest rate; this is that rate.

$P$

DIEM price in USD: GeckoTerminal token-level aggregate, DexScreener fallback.

The face value of the stream is $365 per year, so $r^{\ast}$ is the gross annual yield the market demands to hold the claim. No haircut, no assumption: a pure restatement of price.

Spreads and survival half-life

In plain words: how much extra yearly yield DIEM pays over two safer choices, and, read pessimistically, how long the market is acting like Venice has left.

$r_f$

Aave v3 USDC supply APR on Base, a live on-chain risk-free-ish benchmark.

$\text{APR}_{\text{stake}}$

sVVV staking APR, read from the staking contract at the pinned block.

The Desk charts both spreads: the yield DIEM offers over simply staking VVV, and over parking USDC. The survival model reads the Aave spread as a hazard rate on a perpetuity and converts it to a half-life:

Read $t_{1/2}$ as an upper bound on market pessimism about the platform, not a survival forecast: the spread bundles hazard, liquidity, and risk premia. Domain policy: when $s_{\text{Aave}}$ is negative the half-life is undefined and shown as n/a; when it is exactly zero the half-life is infinite.

Mint ceiling

In plain words: what it would cost to make a brand new DIEM yourself; nobody sensible pays much more for a coupon book than the machine charges to print one.

$P_{\text{VVV}}$

VVV price in USD, same sources as P.

$m$

marginal mint rate (DIEM per sVVV), read from the staking contract at the pinned block.

$0.20$

locked-emissions share: a documented modeling parameter matching the contract's veniceEmissionsPercentageWhenLocked.

Above the hard ceiling anyone can stake VVV, mint DIEM, and sell. The carry variant adds the staking yield forgone on the locked collateral, treated as a perpetuity and capitalized at $r^{\ast}$. That capitalization is an explicit modeling assumption, which is why the Desk shows the ceiling as a band rather than a line.

Redemption wall

In plain words: what the original minters would pay to buy their coupons back and unlock their collateral, stacked up price by price.

$\text{sVVV}_i$

collateral locked in position i, rebuilt from raw mint and burn events; the event log is canonical.

$\text{DIEM}_i$

DIEM outstanding in position i, from the same rebuild.

$h$

2% haircut for VVV price risk over the 7-day unstake cooldown, an explicit assumption.

Only original minters can redeem, each at their own average mint rate, so the floor is not a line but a demand curve. Each position has its own breakeven $P_{\text{be},\,i}$; sorting positions by breakeven and walking down in price stacks the cumulative DIEM buy-back demand into the wall. The Desk also reports the aggregate moneyness of these conversion options: a position is in the money when its unlock value per DIEM exceeds the market price, and the aggregate intrinsic value is $\textstyle\sum_i \max(\text{unlock}_i - \text{market}_i,\, 0)$.

Utilization-adjusted fair value

In plain words: the desk's own answer to what a coupon book is worth: count only the coupons that actually get used, take a small fee off, and discount the stream for the risk that it ends.

$u$

share of the daily $1 credit actually consumed.

$f$

pricing factor, at most 0.98 by the settlement mechanics; the sensitivity view fixes it at that cap.

$0.98$

broker-fee keep rate: the lender receives 98 cents per settled dollar. A different constant from the f cap, even though the two happen to share a value.

$r$

required yield; slider, default 0.25.

The desk ships this as sliders for $u$ and $r$ plus the iso-price curve inside the desk model card rather than a single number: the desk does not publish a price target. Two companion numbers come from the same mechanics:

Consumer value $V_c$ counts only what a holder actually spends; credits that reset unused are worth zero. Breakeven utilization $u_{\text{be}}$ inverts the fair value at the market price and traces the iso-price curve; points where it exceeds 1 are omitted rather than clamped, because a clamped point would no longer satisfy V = P.

The fixed $r$ of 25% can be read in two parts: a few points for what safe dollars earn (the live Aave rate on the desk page), and the rest as the market's insurance charge against the stream ending. Treat that residual as a hazard equivalent, not a literal probability: it bundles survival with liquidity and risk premia, the same caveat as the half-life metric above. At today's risk-free rate the residual implies a half life of roughly three and a half years, and the desk page computes that decomposition live rather than freezing it here.

Purchasing power index

In plain words: does one day's coupon buy more AI work than it used to, or less? This index is that, with the shopping basket frozen so nobody can quietly swap the groceries.

The basket is locked by explicit model ids and versioned (v1, locked 2026-06-12: 1M input plus 1M output tokens on claude-opus-4-8 plus 10 images on z-image-turbo). Rising PPI means a DIEM-day buys more inference than at the base date. A day with an incomplete basket is skipped, never substituted. Changing the basket requires a new version chain-linked at the overlap; silent re-basing is forbidden.

Word on the canal: the street models

What it is

Community valuation models for DIEM and VVV, archived from public posts and shown with full attribution. The desk supplies the apparatus (the market line, yields, on-chain series); the authors keep their opinions. The desk model appears as one equal row among them and can never be privileged.

Provenance

The shared framing here did not come from the desk. In Venice's launch week, the founder, Erik Voorhees, described DIEM as valuable by a perpetuity formula on its daily compute credit, and VVV as having no obvious ceiling, in his post. Most street models archived here, and the desk model, build on that first framing: a daily coupon discounted to present value. The desk did not originate the idea, only the measurements.

Archival policy

Each model is archived the day it is catalogued: full post text, engagement counts, capture timestamp, and link. The archive is canonical; the page never depends on the live post. If an author edits or deletes the original, the entry is flagged but never rewritten. Archived quotations are rendered verbatim. Registry entries are immutable and versioned: any change to content, parameters, or formula is a new version, and history keeps the old one.

Re-run, never adjusted

Recomputable models are re-run daily with the author's exact published formula. A parameter bound to a live input (oracle utilization, the on-chain mint rate, a dependency on another model's value) uses the live value when it carries signal and the author's published value otherwise; the parameter table marks which is which. One exception is deliberate: the desk's own VVV floor row never substitutes a published value for a missing input; a day without a live mint rate or a desk DIEM value is a gap in the series, because a floor computed from a guess would not be a floor. The desk never substitutes its own judgment into an author's formula. Two consequences worth naming: the utilization oracle currently posts zero with a stale timestamp, which the desk treats as missing signal rather than zero usage; and the desk's measured secondary-market realization is NOT fed into any author's credit-realization assumption, because liquidating a credit and using one are different economics. Models whose stated conclusion has no dollar level (a multiple, a framework) are archived and shown but excluded from the tape chart.

On the tape chart, a dotted segment to the left of a model's post date is the desk re-running the author's formula over days before the post existed. It is hindsight, drawn dimmed and dotted, and it is not a claim the author made at the time. Models that state a level without a formula get no hindsight segment, and no segment is drawn for days the asset had no market price.

The desk rows

The desk model for DIEM is $V(u,\, 0.98,\, r)$ with $r$ fixed at 25% (the street's median required yield when the page launched) and $u$ at the 0.5 scenario midpoint until utilization data carries signal; its band spans $u$ from 0.25 to 1.0. These are documented scenario parameters, not a forecast, and they only change with a version bump recorded here.

The desk's second row lives on the VVV side: the mint-window floor, $m \times V_{\text{DIEM}}$, where $m$ is the live marginal mint rate and $V_{\text{DIEM}}$ is the desk DIEM value above. It is a floor, not a target. The desk declines to publish a VVV fair value at all: staking emissions are paid for by dilution, the claimed buyback burns are not yet verified on chain, and the contract owner can change the mint curve, the emissions, and the cooldown at will. What remains provable is what the mint window justifies, so that is the published number, and the premium the market pays above it is shown rather than explained away.

Data sources

Prices: GeckoTerminal token-level aggregate (primary) with DexScreener fallback, recorded per snapshot with per-pool detail. On-chain: all reads through a single finalized block pinned per day on Base via Alchemy; contract addresses are documented facts, verified against source. Venice catalog: the public models endpoint, snapshotted daily per model. Every value carries its source label into the UI and the CSV exports.

Gondola

Gondola is a DIEM inference marketplace: DIEM holders lend idle Venice API capacity and buyers pay in USDC. The desk reads its public market data daily as a secondary cross-check on the primary Surplus series below, and unlike Surplus it publishes settled, venue-wide numbers with history. Three figures are recorded, each labeled Gondola and none fed into any fair-value formula: a settled realization, the USDC a lender nets per $1 of Venice list face consumed (lender received over DIEM consumed), which loosely cross-checks the desk's primary realization; a discount versus Venice list, the median across active text models of the best marketplace quote against Venice's own list price, a trailing 24 hour observation of quotes rather than executed fills; and the venue's daily volume with its active lender and buyer counts, carried alongside every figure because the venue is still thin. Only the realization is directly comparable to Surplus; the discount uses a different denominator and the volume is a single venue, not the whole market.

Surplus marketplace

Surplus Intelligence is the desk's primary and canonical DIEM secondary-market source. Its public market data is ingested daily as the DIEM secondary market in inference credits: sellers there are overwhelmingly Venice-API keys funded by DIEM. Three metrics are recorded, each over a sampled top-20 order books by volume, never marketplace totals: executed 24h volume on Venice-host offers; the median QUOTED discount of the best Venice offer vs each book's direct-provider reference price; and an estimated realization, the USDC received per $1 of Venice-credit face consumed, matched against Venice's own catalog prices. Realization and discount have different denominators (Venice list prices carry a markup over direct providers), so the two numbers are not comparable, and neither is fed into any author's model.

VeniceStats cross-check

VeniceStats is an independent community analytics site built by @gekko_eth, not affiliated with Venice.ai or with this desk. The desk uses it strictly as a secondary cross-check, never as a canonical input: every metric published here is computed from the desk's own on-chain reads and event indexer, and historical series are self-derived from chain events. A cross-check script diffs the desk's numbers against VeniceStats' public API to catch divergence, and the results are labeled as a check, not a source. Where the desk cites a figure from VeniceStats, it is attributed to VeniceStats with a link. Per their terms, VeniceStats' own disclaimer applies to that data: it may contain inaccuracies and should be verified independently.

Verification and change control

The Phase-1 numbers passed an independent recomputation gate on 2026-07-18 (three dates, every derived metric, the basket, and position breakevens; recorded in the repository). The daily snapshot writes only fields whose step succeeded, so a retry never overwrites good history; failed steps are recorded with their errors in the row's audit trail. CSV exports of every series exist for hand verification at /api/export (metrics, positions, models, street).

FAQ

Disclaimer

Analytics, not financial advice. The desk observes; it never transacts on chain. Street models are community work reproduced under attribution for commentary; their conclusions belong to their authors. Nothing on this site is a recommendation to buy or sell anything.