Pi Network is a mobile-first blockchain project launched by a team of Stanford University PHDS in 2019. As of July 2025, it has attracted 45 million active users worldwide, covering 230 countries and regions. Its core adopts the Federal Byzantine Protocol (FBA) consensus mechanism, enabling smartphone users to participate in mining by simply clicking every day. The energy consumption is only 0.00018% of that of Bitcoin PoW mining (about 0.01kWh per day). The user growth curve has shown a viral spread – with a monthly growth rate of 11.2% in 2023, far exceeding the industry average of 2.3% (Statista data), mainly due to its social viral model: Each user can invite 5 members to form a security circle. For every additional member in the team size, the mining rate can be increased by approximately 0.04π per hour.
Technological innovation lowers the threshold for public participation. The cost of traditional Bitcoin mining machines exceeds $5,000 (Bitmain S21 model), while pi can participate with just a smartphone, eliminating the hardware investment threshold. Testnet data shows that the network’s TPS (transactions per second) reached 314 transactions (Q2 2025 data), which is lower than Solana’s 65,000 transactions, but still competitive compared to the 1,700 transactions of the traditional bank VISA system. The key breakthrough lies in its hierarchical architecture: the pioneer nodes use the Stellar Consensus Protocol (SCP), and the verification nodes adopt threshold signature technology, compressing the transaction confirmation time to an average of 3.4 seconds (10 minutes for Bitcoin), while ordinary users only need a single click operation to take 0.5 seconds per day for mining.
Economic model design precisely incentivizes early participation. In the initial stage, the daily mining output declined over time: in March 2019, it could earn over 200π per day, but by August 2025, it had dropped to 0.39π per day, simulating the Bitcoin halving mechanism but with the cycle shortened to 24 months. 7/π (a 470% increase compared to 2021). Especially in emerging markets, it has performed outstandingly: Nigerian users account for 14.3%, and the monthly transaction volume ina single region exceeds 2.3 million US dollars (Chainalysis report 2025), mainly due to its provision of a zero-cost path to participate in the Web3 economy (the opening fees of traditional financial accounts all exceed 8% of the average monthly income).
The social communication mechanism creates network effects. The project rewards ecosystem builders through “Proof of Contribution”. Developers can receive up to 20% of the transaction share when deploying DApps on the PiOS platform. In 2024, the Vietnamese developer team BuildOnPi created the payment application PiPay within 73 days, attracting 890,000 users to bind offline merchants, and the cumulative developer income exceeded 500,000 π. The case of people’s livelihood is even more penetrating: Filipino fishermen purchased new fishing boats through the pi community with 200π (about $6,200) instead of the high annual interest rate of 62% from traditional banks, and their capital efficiency increased by more than ten times. At present, the testnet has 387 active applications, and the median usage frequency of users has reached 3.2 times per day.
Regulatory gray areas have sparked a speculative boom. Despite the mainnet being postponed to Q1 2026 (32 months later than originally planned), user engagement is still on the rise – the number of daily KYC verifications will exceed 180,000 by June 2025. This heat partly stems from regulatory arbitrage space: In the 2024 “Howey Metrics” report of the US SEC, Pi was listed as “low regulatory priority” (with a risk score of 2.1/10), while the Reserve Bank of India defined it as “user loyalty points” to circumvent security recognition. Although there is a price deviation of 15-28% in over-the-counter trading (the peak spread between the markets in Europe, the United States and Africa reached $58), the liquidity depth increased by 7.3% month-on-month (Arcane Research in 2025), reflecting the expected premium of the market for access to compliant exchanges such as Binance after the mainnet goes live. The global pi community is still waiting for a crucial leap to truly realize its value, which has kept it at the top of the list of non-professional investors’ attention for a long time (Google Trends Index 86/100).