Pi Network: Years Waiting for What?

Now, almost six years after launch, users continue to earn Pi tokens the same way. But there's a glaring problem—those coins aren’t tradeable, and no exchange supports them.

Despite launching nearly six years ago, Pi Network users continue to acquire tokens through the same method. However, a glaring issue persists: these coins remain non-tradeable, with no exchanges offering support for them. Despite the significant hype surrounding the project, the only recent development is the introduction of a tradeable Pi token on a blockchain, albeit remaining non-tradeable. Curiously, this blockchain technology has been available for several years, begging the question: why the delay?

As Pi Network prepares for its highly anticipated mainnet launch, reportedly scheduled for December, further details have emerged. It turns out that Pi will be utilizing the Stellar Consensus Protocol (SCP), a well-established blockchain technology created by the Stellar network.

While the implications may not be immediately clear to most users, this is a significant revelation. Instead of developing their own proprietary technology, Pi is essentially leveraging open-source code from the Stellar blockchain, which was launched in 2014, five years prior to Pi.

This isn't inherently wrong - Stellar is a legitimate blockchain - but the issue lies in Pi’s portrayal of their work. They’ve led users to believe they were developing something new and revolutionary.

Essentially, Pi users have waited 5 years for them to launch using someone else's 10 year old technology.

No, You Didn't Mine Anything...

While Pi Network refers to it as mobile mining, the fine print will tell you this has always been and always will be a 'simulation' - you're playing a video game. 

There is a way to really mine Pi tokens now, but it requires running their node software, and you'll need a real computer.

If millions of phones were actively validating transactions (mining), this wouldn't be necessary.

Not Adding Up...

Pi Network claims a user base of over 60 million worldwide, but this doesn’t align with the reality of only 6 million active wallets. Even more striking is that only 0.16% of these wallets show any activity—a level of engagement that's unusually low for a supposedly active blockchain.

If the "60 million" figure is accurate, it likely refers to total signups over time rather than active users. This number may include accounts created years ago, opened once, and subsequently abandoned, leading to inflated statistics that don’t reflect the current state of user engagement.

Pi’s Future Value...

Pi fans searching for the token on CoinMarketCap were excited to find a coin labeled as “Pi” priced at $34.45. However, this is ultimately misleading. The listed coin appears to be a scam, a completely unrelated token using the Pi name and logo. The official Pi team has made it clear, their tokens cannot currently be transferred, and they have no listing on any exchange - so ignore this.

With no trading happening, all users can do is speculate, and the Pi Subreddit is full of this. Pi supporters engage in wildly optimistic price predictions. Most estimates fall somewhere in the range of $10 to $100, which is already insane.  Then there's the extremes, outliers speculating as high as $1,000 per token based on flawed reasoning like "if Pi becomes half as popular as Bitcoin." These are guesses out of thin air, based on nothing. 

Pi should be looked at like any other coin that gave away a large portion of it's supply to anyone willing to press a button, aka 'Tap To Earn'. If you look at what happens when these coins start to be traded, we see a huge number of holders simply unloading their supply as soon as possible, and the value immediately crashing.   

Here's what happened with two recent launches of tap-to-earn tokens:

Then, there's still so many free coins still in circulation, any time the coin begins to gain value, there's a long line of people still waiting to dump theirs, keeping the price down forever.

So, What Are the Pi Owners Up to? 

While they haven't sold any Pi tokens, they may have found creative ways to profit from people wanting free ones. With millions of people reportedly opening the Pi app each week to “mine” tokens by pressing a button, they’re also being served ads. This monetization model could be quite lucrative for Pi Network, especially if users are unaware they can disable the ads. On mobile apps, ad revenue can quickly add up when multiplied by millions of daily users.

But advertising may only scratch the surface of the Pi Network’s potential revenue streams. There’s a bigger concern: user data, which brings me to my next point...

Privacy Concerns...

When users sign up for Pi, they are agreeing to share a broad range of personal data. Pi Network collects browsing history, chat messages, comments, likes, location data (including GPS and Wi-Fi information), contact lists, device details,