Looked into signing up with venice.ai and was innediately asked for a credit card because they are not 'allowed' to offer a free service in the UK.I asked co-pilot why this was and was told this:It isn’t a general ban on free software. The blocker is that Venice.ai’s “free tier” isn’t just software access—it’s distributing and promoting its own crypto-style usage tokens. Under UK law those tokens qualify as regulated financial instruments, and giving them away or advertising them to UK residents without FCA authorisation breaches the Financial Services and Markets Act 2000 (FSMA) and related cryptoassets rules.# What Venice.ai must do to “go free” in the UK1. Remove all token-based incentives from the UK tier: make it a time- or usage-limited demo only. 2. Or obtain full FCA cryptoasset registration and approval for financial promotions. 3. Clearly separate “service trial” (software demo) from any “value credit” that users might treat as an investment. By decoupling its free offering from any tradeable token, Venice.ai could legally reopen a UK-facing free service without breaching FSMA.Rightly or not, this looks very much like a crypto scam. Venice should do better.
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