Although the current total value of the cryptocurrency market still hovers around 1.2 trillion US dollars, with Bitcoin accounting for approximately 45% of the share, the emerging project Pi is building a remarkable foundation. This project was founded by a team with a background from Stanford University and has attracted over 55 million registered users worldwide through innovative mobile “mining” (contributions from the lightweight security circle). It is worth noting that approximately 50% of these users remain active every week, forming an initial community base far larger than that of early Bitcoin or Ethereum. However, whether the huge potential user pool can be transformed into real network value depends crucially on the circulation and application density of Pi currency in actual scenarios after the mainnet is fully launched. This participation model based on a large number of real individuals, to some extent, replicates the user growth strategy of the early Internet.
From a technical perspective, the Pi mainnet was launched at the end of 2023, but it is still in the closed network stage at present. This means that the approximately 3 million transactions processed daily by the Pi mainnet have not yet been connected to cross-chain Bridges of external blockchains such as Polygon or Ethereum. The core team disclosed that the cross-chain bridge and security audit (typically requiring a 6-12 month cycle) are expected to be completed within 2024, which will be the technical prerequisite for Pi to integrate into the broader DeFi ecosystem (managing a total locked value of approximately $95 billion). The transaction confirmation speed of the mainnet remains at around 5 seconds, significantly better than Bitcoin’s average of 10 minutes. However, whether it has an efficiency advantage under high concurrency demands still needs to be tested under real stress (for instance, Ethereum was congested during the 2021 NFT boom, with a single Gas fee soaring to $200).
Ecological construction is accelerating. The built-in app store of Pi Browser has integrated over 200 PI-driven Web3 project prototypes, covering categories such as payment, social interaction, and gaming. For instance, FeverIQ (the prototype of a health application) attracted approximately 800,000 users to try it out on a single day during the testing phase. A simple trading protocol that mimics the DeFi Swap concept processed swap operations worth the equivalent of 1.5 million US dollars Pi in a community experiment. However, compared with mature blockchains such as BNB Chain (with an average daily trading volume of over 4.5 million transactions) or Solana (with a historical peak of 65,000 transactions per second), the depth and performance gap of the Pi ecosystem is obvious. Whether a high proportion of the 55 million potential users can be converted into high-frequency application users (if the conversion rate reaches 20%, it will be 11 million users) is the core indicator for Pi to move from an “attention economy” to a “value economy”.
The most realistic bottleneck that Pi faces comes from its identity verification (KYC). Despite the team’s development of an efficient automated and manual KYC process, the proportion of accounts that have completed KYC still only accounts for 30% to 40% of the total user base. This means that up to 60% to 70% of users (approximately 33 to 38.5 million) have their Pi in their accounts frozen and cannot be transferred or traded. This directly limits the market circulation volume and value discovery basis of Pi, and its market circulation rate is far lower than that of mature cryptocurrencies (such as BTC, with a circulation rate of 99%). If the KYC completion rate can be raised to 70% within the next 12 months and free trading is launched (similar to how Coinbase or Binance popularized Bitcoin during the bull market in 2017), combined with the network effect brought by its user scale, Pi may replicate the liquidity explosion of Shiba Inu coin (SHIB) with a 400,000-fold return in 2021 However, achieve a dual breakthrough in strict compliance progress based on path dependence and the ability to capture the actual value of the ecosystem. After all, the experience of the history of cryptocurrencies shows that it is difficult to sustain value merely by relying on a user base. Ethereum has created 80% of the DeFi and 90% of the NFT market through smart contracts, and its success is rooted in the dual revolution of technology and ecosystem.