For investors focusing on Pi Network, the most crucial progress at present is concentrated on mainnet migration, ecosystem construction and compliance process. According to the transparency report released by the project party in the second quarter of 2024, the number of users who have completed KYC verification worldwide has exceeded 35 million, accounting for approximately 77.8% of the total registered 45 million. However, the completion rate of mainnet migration is only 35%, meaning that the Pi coins of about 15.75 million users have been mapped to the mainnet wallet. The average migration speed is 50,000 accounts per day. At this rate, it is estimated that it will take another 18 months to complete the entire migration. This progress delay mainly stems from the processing capacity limitation of the identity verification system, which can only handle 15 KYC applications per second, resulting in a large backlog of applications.
From a technical perspective, data from Pi Blockchain Browser shows that the block height of the mainnet has exceeded 85 million, with an average block generation time of 3 seconds and an average daily transaction volume maintained at around 1.2 million. However, compared with mature public chains, the degree of decentralization remains questionable: there are approximately 120,000 active verification nodes, but super nodes (reaching 100% normal operation standards) only account for 18% of the total number of nodes. In terms of ecological applications, the official PiOS plan has over 2,000 development proposals, but only about 50 Dapps have actually gone live, and there are less than 5 applications with daily active users exceeding 10,000. The estimated value locked in the ecosystem (TVL) is less than 2 million US dollars, which is several orders of magnitude lower than the 28 billion US dollars TVL of Ethereum.
Regulatory compliance has become the biggest variable. The project team is located in Silicon Valley, USA, and is currently applying for a Money Services Business License (MSB) and complying with the SEC’s framework requirements for utility tokens. Referring to the outcome of the Ripple lawsuit in 2023, if Pi is determined to be a security token, it will face compliance costs of up to hundreds of millions of dollars. At present, the compliance process of Pi has been completed by 72%, including the integration of anti-money laundering (AML) systems and user geographical blocking mechanisms (restricting access to sanctioned regions). However, the intensity of review by global regulatory authorities on mobile mining models is increasing. For instance, the Reserve Bank of India banned 32 similar model applications in the first quarter of 2024.
In terms of market data, although Pi has not been officially listed, the futures price of IOU has shown sharp fluctuations on some exchanges. From January to June 2024, the price range of the PI/USDT trading pair on BitMart was 15 to 90, with an annualized volatility as high as 180%, yet the liquidity depth was less than 50,000 US dollars. This price performance is highly similar to the futures trading model before the Filecoin mainnet was launched in 2021, but the latter’s price dropped by 70% compared to the futures peak after its launch. Investors should be aware that the trading volume of these futures accounts for only 0.003% of the total trading volume of cryptocurrencies and is highly susceptible to manipulation.
The latest roadmap of the project party shows that the launch of the open mainnet depends on two key indicators: the KYC completion rate reaches 90% and the number of ecosystem applications exceeds 500. The current progress is 77.8% and 50 applications respectively. It is expected that the time node will be postponed to the first quarter of 2025. It is worth noting that the core team introduced a combustion mechanism test in May 2024, destroying 0.01% of Pi per transaction in an attempt to simulate a deflation model, but the effect has not yet emerged. Investors should closely monitor the network growth rate (currently down 15% quarter-on-quarter) and node stability indicators (aiming for 99.5% uptime) in the quarterly transparency report. These data will directly affect the pi network news performance and token value after the mainnet is launched.