The Truth About Venice AI & Bittensor TAO (Only 1 Has Real Utility)

In this comparison, Finance Freeman stacks Venice AI and Bittensor (TAO) side-by-side and zeroes in on the single question that matters most for any AI crypto project: is the token needed for the network to function, or is it just a coin sitting next to a working product?

His answer ends up being more pointed than most comparison videos.

The basic snapshot

What each project actually does

• Venice is a privacy-focused decentralized LLM. It runs its own model and aggregates others (ChatGPT, Anthropic), with the key value prop being that your chats aren’t stored indefinitely. The product has real usage (millions of monthly users).
• Bittensor is the decentralized AI ecosystem. TAO is the layer-1 coin, and the network supports up to 128 subnets (soon 256), each one essentially an independent AI company building inference, storage, training, privacy, or whatever the subnet owner decides. To get exposure to any individual subnet, you swap TAO into that subnet’s alpha token.

The key question: does the token actually matter?

This is where Finance Freeman gets sharp. He uses Ondo as his cautionary tale, a project with real-world tokenization happening but a token that just keeps bleeding because there’s no real correlation between the company’s activity and the token’s value.

Venice’s token utility:

• Has a burn mechanism tied to platform usage
• Offers ~15% staking yield
• Has burned ~$500M in tokens to date
• But users can pay with USDC or credit card, not just Venice (VVV). The platform still uses revenue to buy and burn Venice on the back end, but users are not forced to hold or use the token.
• Net effect: if user growth doesn’t keep pace with token price, the burn mechanism loses efficiency, and value accrual to holders weakens.

TAO’s token utility:

• TAO is the layer-1 coin powering the entire network. Like ETH or SOL, the ecosystem literally cannot operate without it.
• Every subnet token is denominated in TAO. Every emission, every stake, every subnet competition flows through it.
• The thesis on TAO is not “will the token be used?”, it’s “will at least one subnet hit it out of the park?” That’s a different (and arguably stronger) bet.

The verdict

• Venice has a great product. The privacy-focused LLM use case is 100% needed. But the token is not strictly required for the platform to function, and that’s a structural weakness even with a working burn mechanism.
• TAO’s token is 100% required for the ecosystem to operate. The debate is whether decentralized AI as a thesis wins, not whether the token has utility.
• Freeman’s closing zinger: Venice’s LLM was actually partially trained on Targon, a Bittensor subnet. From his lens, “there is no reason Venice isn’t just the number one subnet on Bittensor.”

Bottom line

Both projects are exciting on the product side, and both represent early signals that AI compute and revenue are heading on-chain. But if you’re betting on token-level value accrual, the structural case is much cleaner for TAO. Venice can only deliver returns if usage keeps growing fast enough to outrun the optional-token problem; TAO captures value as a side effect of any subnet succeeding inside the ecosystem.

Full video below: