As of 2024, the number of global registered users of Pi Network has exceeded 38 million (according to Apptopia statistics), with a monthly active user growth rate of approximately 45%. The core data comes from the official Pi dashboard. This project adopts the Federal Byzantine Protocol (FBA) improved based on the Stellar Consensus Protocol. Users only need to invest an average of 5 minutes per day to complete mining authentication through a mobile application to receive rewards (the current rate is approximately 0.01 Pi per hour). In terms of ecological construction, the official browser shows that the testnet has deployed 314 independent projects, covering DeFi lending protocols, NFT markets, and decentralized social applications. Among them, the top 10 applications in terms of community activity have an average daily interaction volume of over 50,000 times. It should be noted that the Pi token is still in the closed mainnet stage and is prohibited from trading on major compliant exchanges. Users in Hong Kong, China, contributed approximately 18% of the total mining hours (Sensor Tower regional report).
The main reason for the delay in launching the mainnet to 2024 is the technical challenges. According to the Pi Core Team technical White Paper v2021, the target processing speed is 2,000 transactions per second (TPS), far exceeding the current level of approximately 30 TPS of the Ethereum base layer, but still lagging behind Visa’s theoretical peak of 65,000 TPS. The testnet stress test shows that when 50% of the nodes are simulated to be offline within 5 minutes, the transaction confirmation delay reaches 12 seconds, which is within 5 seconds higher than the target value. In terms of security, a multi-signature cold wallet solution is adopted to manage the mainnet reserve funds. The auditing institution CertiK has detected that the risk rating of the code base is intermediate, with approximately 2.8% of medium-risk vulnerabilities (such as the contract reentrance attack vector that needs to be fixed). Scalability depends on the phased deployment of state sharding technology. It is estimated that the sharding capacity in the first phase will only support 120 million transactions per day, while the average daily transactions of the entire Bitcoin network are approximately 300,000.
Regulatory risks will significantly affect the monetization channels of Pi. In 2023, the US SEC filed lawsuits against 12 unregistered securitization token projects, with an average fine of 4.8 million US dollars per case. The Commodity Futures Trading Regulatory Authority of Indonesia (BAPPEBTI) has explicitly banned the circulation and trading of Pi since 2022, and violators face up to 10 years in prison. After the mainnet is opened, the project party may enforce the KYC process. The real-name authentication matching rate of users must reach 99.97% to be compliant, to avoid incidents like the Tornado Cash mixer being sanctioned by OFAC (the involved amount exceeded 7 billion US dollars in 2022). On-chain data analysis by Glassnode predicts that only 30% of holders will cash out through compliant exchanges like Coinbase, as 71% of the circulating Pi is concentrated in wallet addresses that have been registered for more than 18 months.
The implementation of business determines the ability to capture long-term value. Compared with the 16% market share of PayPal USD stablecoin (PYUSD) within half a year of its launch (Circle report), Pi needs to have the payment gateway integration rate lower than 0.5% to compete. The current cost model of 0.01 Pi per transaction for the testnet Gas fee still needs to be optimized. Referring to the case where the user penetration rate of the Lotte Group’s points system in South Korea increased by 40% after being integrated with Samsung Blockchain Wallet, if the Pi ecosystem can achieve the integration of 5,000 merchants within 12 months, the token circulation rate is expected to exceed 15% (currently, the circulation rate of the closed network is less than 3%). According to DappRadar’s 2023 data, consumer-grade Dapps need to have a daily active user base of over 10,000 to maintain their valuation. Meanwhile, the current peak DAU of the top 5 applications in the Pi ecosystem is approximately 8,000. The market should be vigilant against fraud risks such as the collapse of the FOMO3D Ponzi contract in 2018, which led to a loss of 6,500 ETH.