Crypto’s AI segment moved sharply on Sept. 9, with privacy inference project Venice seeing its token VVV climb nearly 40% in a single day. The price briefly rose above $25, setting a new all-time high.
TechFlowPost said the move also put fresh attention on Bankless co-founder David Hoffman’s post-ETH portfolio. The report said Hoffman had sold the ETH he held for six years and then bought LIT, ZEC, NEAR, HYPE and VVV. Before this rally, VVV had been the laggard in that basket. After the latest surge, the article said every position in the group had now posted a major gain.
Some traders who follow on-chain activity may point to fundamentals. TechFlowPost noted that Venice set a new token buyback-and-burn record of $390,000 in September. Still, the report argued that the strength in fundamentals was only part of the story and that narrative trading and market sentiment were also central to the sudden breakout.
OpenAI controversy puts privacy AI back at the center of attention
According to the report, the immediate catalyst was a weekend controversy involving OpenAI and an academic dispute over unpublished research.
TechFlowPost wrote that privacy AI is not a new idea, but it has often been treated as a niche concept because the market did not see an urgent real-world pain point. That changes when a negative event lands. In those moments, privacy becomes the focus again, and attention and liquidity can move quickly toward tokens tied to that theme.
The article identified two mathematicians, Tristan Buckmaster and Levent Alpöge, as the key figures in the case. Over the past year, the report said, they had been working on a highly technical proof involving fluid equations and had fed large amounts of unpublished draft material into OpenAI’s coding tool Codex during the process.
The dispute escalated in early September. TechFlowPost said that after Tristan privately clarified the research with OpenAI, company researchers stated in a call a few days later that their internal model had also produced a proof running hundreds of pages and using the same highly obscure technical route. When asked directly whether they had looked at user drafts inside Codex, OpenAI representatives were described as evasive and did not give a clear answer on whether training data had been used.
The report also cited allegations that OpenAI proposed an aggressive publication arrangement during talks and may have used the prospect of the $1 million Clay mathematics prize as leverage, including the remark, 「Why would you ruin your own career?」 OpenAI later issued a denial, according to the article.
Even so, the episode spread quickly through both tech and crypto circles. TechFlowPost quoted former OpenAI and Meta engineer Susan Zhang as saying that many observers were fixated on the personal conflict while missing the core issue: when the incentives are big enough, can leading AI labs access private user work and get ahead of it first?
VVV rally feeds a broader privacy AI narrative
As the debate widened, a statement from David Hoffman circulated heavily on social media. The report quoted him as saying, 「Frontier AI labs will systematically steal user data to gain an edge in competition. It is an arms race.」
TechFlowPost also noted that Hoffman has a disclosed position in VVV and reads the token through a specific lens: privacy AI as a pushback against closed AI labs.
Whether or not one agrees with that framing, the article said fear over data control by closed AI giants had become a dominant mood on English-language crypto social media. Combined with VVV’s own move, that was enough to push the privacy AI narrative back into short-term focus.
The report listed several reasons traders have used to justify the bullish case on Venice after sentiment spilled over: end-to-end encryption, no collection of user data, real Web2 business revenue that is unusual among VC-backed tokens, and seven consecutive months of deflationary burns.
At the same time, the article warned that after such a sharp move, chasing VVV carries much higher risk. That has led part of the market to ask which other names tied to the same theme may not yet be fully priced.
Traders turn to NEAR AI Cloud as a possible linked infrastructure play
Following Venice’s business logic deeper into the stack, TechFlowPost said the crypto community has begun focusing on an infrastructure angle.
To deliver what Venice describes as end-to-end encrypted private inference, the project needs decentralized compute and confidential computing infrastructure. The report said some analysts believe that underlying service is provided by NEAR Protocol’s AI Cloud.
It added that as VVV gained momentum, NEAR’s official channels openly pointed to the tie between the two. According to the article, Venice’s end-to-end encryption runs on NEAR AI Cloud; users can swap into VVV anonymously on NEAR and can also stake to access premium services. In that framing, the full loop of confidential AI and DeFi depends on NEAR infrastructure.
Still, TechFlowPost was careful to say that this remains narrative-driven for now. Whether capital has actually rotated into NEAR is something that still needs to be confirmed or disproved through further on-chain analysis. Even so, the idea of looking for related assets after the leading token has already moved is a common market approach during localized rallies.
Similar rotation logic has appeared in other crypto themes
The article pointed to an earlier example involving Robinhood’s Pons. After token issuance activity reportedly boosted revenue and the token rallied, traders began looking at related names such as Uniswap, which was described as being behind token launches on the Robinhood chain, and Arbitrum, which the report said provided technology licensing for that chain. After UNI confirmed gains, some more aggressive traders even began looking at Sushiswap.
TechFlowPost said this kind of association trade does not hold up perfectly in every case, but tracking adjacent assets around a hot narrative remains a familiar tactic in rotating crypto markets.
The article closed with a note that the information was compiled from crypto social media and does not constitute investment advice. It also warned that crypto tokens are highly volatile and carry significant risk, urging readers to do their own research.
