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, which is why the vault refuses a DIEM redemption that would pay out less than that — an amount below the minimum would be a token you could not put to work.

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 owes the credit, not Inference Markets

Inference Markets is an independent project that uses a public token Venice issued. "Powered by Venice AI" is our own line and not a claim of partnership, and there is no agreement between the two. Inference Markets delivers DIEM; Venice delivers the inference, under Venice's terms, which are Venice's to change. If you redeem into DIEM you are taking a position on a promise made by a company. Risks states this without softening.

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.

A stale DIEM feed stops DIEM payouts in the vault, stops the vault's DIEM rebalancing, and blocks DIEM-paired launches. USDC redemption keeps working throughout, because it reads only the coin's own feed.

The pool is thin, and anyone keeps the reserve in band

The Aerodrome VVV/DIEM pool held about 2,350 DIEM of depth when we last checked it. That is not deep. The vault therefore 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 never accepts a worse price than that. Inside the band the call reverts with InBand. needsRebalance(coin) says whether a call would do anything, and the coverage page shows a Rebalance button when it would.

It follows from the same thinness that a large DIEM redemption can exceed what the vault holds for that coin, in which case the redemption reverts with InsufficientDiem and the interface offers USDC instead. The dollars are always there; the DIEM has to be sourced, and it is sourced $2,000 at a time.