Pi Network

Pi Network is a cryptocurrency project built around mobile participation. Its central idea is that people should be able to take part in a network without buying specialized hardware or running energy-intensive equipment, so users interact through a phone app that does not perform conventional mining computation on the device.

The project began in 2019 out of Stanford and spent several years in a closed phase where users accumulated balances that could not be transferred off the network. An open mainnet phase followed, at which point Pi became transferable and began trading externally. The long enclosed period and the size of the registered user base have made the project unusually widely discussed relative to its technical output.

How it works

Pi uses the Stellar Consensus Protocol, a federated Byzantine agreement system in which nodes reach agreement by trusting overlapping sets of peers rather than by expending computational work. Security is layered on top of a global trust graph assembled from individual security circles, where users vouch for people they know. Participants take on defined roles, including pioneers who check in daily, contributors who build security circles, ambassadors who invite others, and node operators who run the software.

Supply

PI has a maximum supply of 100 billion tokens. Total supply currently sits near 17 billion and circulating supply around 11 billion, so a large majority of the maximum has not been issued. Many user balances remain locked under the network's migration and lock-up rules, and unlock schedules meaningfully affect how much supply reaches the market over time.

The project describes itself as a smart contract platform in addition to a currency, with an application ecosystem intended to give the token a use beyond trading. How much of that ecosystem sees real usage is the main open question around the network.