DIEM

DIEM is Venice AI's compute token. One DIEM, staked in a Venice account, gives that account one dollar of Venice API credit every day, in perpetuity, for as long as the stake is held. It is a plain ERC-20 on Base with 18 decimals, it trades on Aerodrome, and any wallet that holds it can stake it. That is what makes it the thing a redemption can deliver: Inference Markets sends you a token, and the inference comes from Venice.

What Venice built

Venice mints DIEM by locking staked VVV, its other token. The DIEM that results is transferable, so it can be sold on a DEX, sent to another wallet, and staked by whoever ends up holding it. The minimum stake is 0.1 DIEM, and the vault sizes every DIEM payout at or above it, so what arrives in your wallet is always an amount you can stake.

The daily credit is API credit inside Venice, usable against Venice's models. No API key changes hands at any point in this protocol, and no key ever could: Venice's terms forbid reselling keys, and Inference Markets never touches one. What moves is the token.

At that price one DIEM pays back its cost in about four and a half years of daily credit, and the 0.1 DIEM minimum stake is about $170 of value.

Venice delivers the credit

Inference Markets is an independent project that uses a public token Venice issued. "Powered by Venice AI" is our own line rather than a claim of partnership. The division is clean: Inference Markets delivers DIEM, and Venice delivers the inference under Venice's terms. That is what makes the redemption one transaction instead of an integration.

How Inference Markets uses it

DIEM shows up in three places.

As a redemption payout. Every synthetic coin can be burned for DIEM instead of dollars. The vault holds DIEM inventory per coin and transfers it to you inside the same transaction that burns your coin. See Redemption for the arithmetic, the spread and the caps.

As a payout preference. Set your preference to DIEM and every claim converts your accrued fees into DIEM before they reach your wallet, whatever the market was paired with. The conversion happens inside your own claim transaction. See Holder rewards.

As a pair coin. A creator can launch a market paired directly with DIEM. Its holders are then paid in Venice capacity itself, block by block, with no synthetic in between. DIEM pairs are routed through Aerodrome rather than through a peg pool, because DIEM is a real asset with a real market.

Staking what you receive

A redemption leaves DIEM in your wallet. To turn it into credit, connect that wallet to Venice and stake the DIEM there. The stake is what starts the daily accrual; DIEM sitting unstaked in a wallet pays nothing. The redeem page links straight to Venice after a DIEM redemption, and shows what the amount is worth per day before you confirm — 1.747 DIEM reads as $1.75 of Venice API credit a day, every day, once staked.

Unstaking and selling are between you and Venice and whatever venue you use. Inference Markets has no part in either.

How the DIEM price is set

The PriceFeed computes DIEM in dollars at the moment a contract asks for it, from three on-chain sources in a chain:

1. quote(DIEM, 1e18, 12) on the Aerodrome VVV/DIEM pool gives DIEM in VVV. Aerodrome's quote is the pool's own time-weighted average over its last 12 half-hour observations, about six hours.
2. quote(VVV, 1e18, 12) on the Aerodrome VVV/WETH pool gives VVV in WETH, the same six-hour average. That pool is the deepest VVV venue, about $14M of liquidity.
3. Chainlink ETH/USD turns WETH into dollars, read live, stale after two hours.

There is no push, no sampling process and no second source. A pool with no observations, or a Chainlink round older than its window, makes the whole chain read Stale(). Because the price is a six-hour average, a spot move on the thin VVV/DIEM pool reaches the feed slowly and only in proportion to how long it is held.

The DIEM legs — payouts, rebalancing and DIEM-paired launches — act on the feed while it is inside its window, and wait for fresh observations outside it. USDC redemption keeps working throughout, because it reads only the coin's own feed.

Anyone keeps the reserve in band

The Aerodrome VVV/DIEM pool held about 2,350 DIEM of depth when we last checked it, so the vault sources DIEM the way a desk would: in measured tranches, against a six-hour average. It keeps its DIEM inventory between 20% and 40% of each coin's reserve by value and moves toward that band a little at a time.

RedemptionVault.rebalance(coin) is permissionless. When a coin's DIEM share is below 20% it buys DIEM with the coin's USDC through the USDC → WETH → VVV → DIEM route; above 40% it sells DIEM back to USDC. Each call moves at most one tranche, trancheUsd, which is $2,000 by default, and the contract refuses a second call on the same coin within five minutes. Every trade is floored at the DIEM TWAP minus 400 bps — the three Aerodrome hops cost about 0.9% in fees, plus impact and the lag of a six-hour average — so whoever calls it, the vault trades at or above that price. Inside the band the call reverts with InBand, because there is nothing to do. needsRebalance(coin) says whether a call would move anything, and the units page shows a Rebalance button when it would.

Inventory is therefore what a DIEM payout is drawn from, and it refills $2,000 at a time on permissionless calls. A redemption larger than the inventory of the moment is offered in USDC instead, in the same interface and the same transaction. The dollars are always there; the DIEM is sourced at a price the vault controls.