Reference

Definitions, the wire formats, and the questions people actually ask. The prose versions live on the buy, use and trust pages.

DEFINITIONS

• Stamp · a Venice API key minted by the clerk. Private models only, a DIEM cap per UTC day, an expiry date. Delivered inside a Zcash encrypted memo and stored by us nowhere.
• DIEM · Venice's inference unit. One staked DIEM is one dollar of API usage per UTC day. The allowance resets at 00:00 UTC and does not roll over.
• Tier · S is 0.5 DIEM per day for 3 days, M is 1 per day for 7 days, L is 3 per day for 30 days.
• Clerk · the process that watches the Zcash wallet, prices notes, mints keys and sends memos. It is also the web server for this page.
• Reply address · your own shielded Zcash address. The stamp goes there. Without it nothing can be delivered and the payment is consumed in silence.
• Note · one incoming shielded output. Deduplication is per note, never per buyer, because the clerk has no idea who a buyer is.

MEMO PROTOCOL

Buyer to clerk, inside a shielded payment:

stamp <S|M|L> reply:<unified or sapling address>

Accepted variants and the exact failure cases are tabulated on the buy page. Maximum 512 bytes, which is a hard protocol limit rather than a truncation point.

Clerk to buyer, on a dust payment to the reply address:

IVlWVlWI stamp M
key: <venice api key>
until: 2026-09-28T12:34Z
use: https://api.venice.ai/api/v1 - private models only - Tor
https://xn--ojq.app

On a rejection, the same dust payment carries a single line explaining what was wrong, for example an underpaid amount or a sold-out tier.

PRICING RULE

Price is the inference the stamp funds, plus the operator margin, plus the cost of delivering the memo. That last part is a flat ZEC cost of roughly thirty cents per stamp: at a high ZEC price it would otherwise exceed the entire margin on tier S. The total is converted to ZEC at a live median of three independent sources: CoinGecko, Kraken and the Hyperliquid ZEC mid. At least two must answer.

• The quote refreshes about every minute.
• The price applied is the one in force when the clerk processes your note, not when you read the page.
• Underpayment is tolerated to three percent. Below that, nothing is issued and the payment is consumed.
• If fewer than two sources answer, or the ones that do disagree by more than five percent, minting pauses rather than guessing. Notes in that state are not consumed and are retried.
• Overpayment grants the highest tier covered. There is no change and no credit.

GET /status.json

Public, same origin, no authentication. Everything the page displays comes from here, and you can fetch it without running our code.

{
  "name": "IVlWVlWI",
  "network": "mainnet",
  "dryRun": false,
  "address": "u1...",
  "zecUsd": 1520.87,
  "priceSources": ["coingecko", "kraken", "hyperliquid"],
  "tiers": [
    { "id": "S", "diemPerDay": 0.5, "days": 3, "usd": 2.09, "zec": "0.00141900" }
  ],
  "capacity": { "total": 0, "committed": 0, "available": 0, "unlimitedDryRun": true },
  "stamps": { "total": 0, "today": 0, "byTier": {}, "dryRun": 0 },
  "burnLane": { "live": false, "chain": "Elysium", "chainId": 99901,
                "publicRpcUrl": null, "token": null,
                "tierAmounts": {}, "finality": "finalized" },
  "memoFormat": "stamp <S|M|L> reply:<your unified address>",
  "updatedAt": "2026-09-21T15:00:00.000Z"
}

Check network and dryRun before sending anything. Check capacity.available against the tier you want. If updatedAt is stale, the clerk is not running.

GET /health

Returns 200 only once a poll has succeeded and fewer than three failures are in a row. 503 otherwise, with the detail inline. If this is unhappy, a payment you already sent is waiting rather than lost.

{ "ok": true, "running": true, "lastPollOk": "…", "lastPollError": null,
  "consecutiveFailures": 0, "lastHeight": 3000001 }

POST /api/burn

The public lane, live only after the IVLW launch. Verifies a burn on Elysium (chain 99901, gas in HYPE) and delivers a stamp by memo. A burn is accepted once its block is at or below the finalized tag, meaning its batch is final on HyperEVM. Counting blocks would mean nothing at 100 ms per block.

{ "txHash": "0x…", "replyTo": "u1…" }

The rate limit is global rather than per address, because keeping per-address counters would mean keeping addresses.

QUESTIONS

• Can I pay from an exchange? No. Exchange withdrawals are transparent and carry no memo. Withdraw to a shielded wallet you control first, let it confirm, then send from the shielded pool.
• What if my memo has a typo? If a reply address survives, you are almost certainly fine: the tier letter is a hint and the clerk grants the best tier your payment covers. If no address survives, the payment is consumed and nothing is sent.
• Can I get more than one stamp per payment? No. One note, one stamp. Send separate transactions for separate stamps, never two memo outputs in one transaction.
• Is there an account, a dashboard or an email? No. The memo is your receipt and your key.
• Can you reissue a key I lost? No. Venice returns a key once, at creation. Our ledger holds its id, not the key. This is unrecoverable for us as well as for you.
• Can I top up a stamp? No. Topping up would require linking a new payment to an old key, which is exactly what this system cannot do. Buy another stamp; two stamps have two independent daily caps.
• Why does the site demand a private window? Habit. A private window means nothing on your machine remembers you were here. The test itself writes one temporary IndexedDB database and deletes it before the page renders.
• Scripting is off in my browser. Then the test cannot run and the page stays closed. You do not need it: the memo format is on the gate screen and the address is in the status document.
• Where is the source? Private during launch, published before mainnet. The security-relevant parts are small: memo parsing, pricing, burn verification and the vault boundary.
• Do I need IVLW to buy a stamp? No. Shielded ZEC works without it and is the more private lane.

THE NAME

IVlWVlWI is VENICE seen reflected in canal water. The letters collapse to strokes: V stays V, E becomes l, N becomes W, and two I pillars hold the reflection in place. Read the middle as VEN and VEN.

Public text is written in a four-glyph cipher built from the same idea. The cipher page encodes and decodes it in your browser.