After more than six years of mobile mining and three years behind a firewall, Pi Network finally opened its mainnet to the outside world on February 20, 2025. That day, the PI token began trading on exchanges, reaching a high of $2.99 before settling into a long decline. Now, fifteen months later, the price hovers around $0.15, smart contracts are live on the mainnet, and the project is undergoing a major protocol upgrade. This timeline captures the key developments, drawing from Pi’s own announcements and verifiable data.
The project started in 2019 as a mobile app from Stanford-affiliated researchers, with founders Nicolas Kokkalis and Chengdiao Fan still leading. Pi’s unique approach allowed users to mine cryptocurrency on smartphones without specialized hardware or high electricity costs. Trust was built through “Security Circles,” where users vouched for each other, creating a social trust graph for Sybil resistance. The consensus model adapted the Stellar Consensus Protocol, avoiding energy-intensive mining. The community grew rapidly, reaching over 60 million users by late 2024, primarily in Asia and Africa. Users had to open the app daily and tap a button to confirm activity, which counted as “mining.” However, no real tokens moved on-chain until KYC and mainnet migration.
In December 2021, Pi launched Enclosed Mainnet, a live blockchain behind a firewall. Users who completed KYC could migrate mined PI to mainnet wallets, but external connectivity was blocked. This phase lasted over three years. The Core Team set three conditions for opening the firewall: sufficient KYC completion, a developed ecosystem of utility apps, and favorable market conditions. By February 2025, Pi deemed these conditions met, and Open Mainnet was scheduled for February 20.
On that day at 8:00 AM UTC, external connectivity was enabled, allowing PI to move to exchanges, swap protocols, and external wallets. Several major exchanges, including OKX, Bitget, MEXC, and Gate, listed PI immediately, either as the native token or initially as IOU tokens that later converted. Trading started at about $1.47, quickly surged to $2.10, and settled around $1.01 by day’s end. In the following weeks, PI hit an all-time high of $2.99 in late February 2025, as years of pent-up demand from longtime miners fueled buying. However, intraday volatility briefly drove the price to $0.049 on the first day due to liquidity gaps and panic selling.
Two structural factors shaped the subsequent price action. First, the initial migrated supply was a small fraction of the eventual circulating supply. Only a minor percentage of Pi’s 100 billion maximum supply was in mainnet wallets on day one. Over time, more PI entered circulation as users completed KYC and rewards were distributed, creating steady inflationary pressure. Second, Binance and Coinbase did not list PI at launch, despite Binance’s community vote showing strong support. This limited liquidity and demand.
From its February peak, PI began a prolonged decline. By mid-2025, it fell below $1; by late 2025, it traded between $0.40 and $0.60. On the first anniversary of Open Mainnet in February 2026, PI was around $0.187, and by mid-May 2026, it sits near $0.15, with a market cap of roughly $1.6 billion, ranking around #55 on CoinMarketCap. The supply unlock schedule remained a headwind, with about 10.4 billion PI circulating as of mid-2026, leaving 90% of the eventual supply yet to enter the market. Demand was further constrained by the lack of tier-1 exchange access, keeping trading volumes modest. Broader crypto market conditions in 2025-2026 were mixed, with Bitcoin reaching new highs then correcting, which also weighed on altcoins.
Beneath the price story, the KYC backlog represented a core user experience challenge. Pi requires identity verification before migration, and the system struggled to keep up with the user base. By late 2025, about 19 million users were KYC-verified and 16 million migrated, out of 60 million claimed users. Many remained in “tentative” status, unable to access their mined PI. Pi addressed the issue by removing a 30-day waiting period, increasing KYC validator rewards, and making 2.5 million more users eligible for migration in January 2026. The project also experimented with palm-based biometric verification. The KYC system serves as Pi’s identity layer and Sybil resistance mechanism, which the Core Team now positions as “human infrastructure for AI.” For unverified users, especially those with uncommon ID formats, the process often involved long waits and uncertainty.
Throughout 2025, Pi continued building its ecosystem. The Pi App Studio launched as a low-code platform for developing apps within the Pi ecosystem, later gaining source code export and advanced capabilities. PiFest, a recurring event encouraging merchants to accept PI, expanded to over 100,000 merchants. The Pi Launchpad, a planned platform for ecosystem token launches, debuted as a testnet MVP in Q1 2026. A Chainlink integration was announced to bring oracle services for future DeFi applications. Testnet underwent phased upgrades, reaching version 23 by September 2025 in preparation for the mainnet upgrade.
Pi Day 2026 on March 14 brought a dense set of announcements. The Pi Launchpad MVP on testnet allowed developers to experiment with token issuance. Pi App Studio integrated Mainnet PI payments, enabling apps to transact in real PI. The Core Team outlined an accelerated protocol upgrade roadmap, starting with Protocol 20.2 already deployed. Over the next weeks, Protocol 21.2 deployed on April 6, Protocol 22.1 on April 22, and Protocol 22 was confirmed on mainnet on April 27. Protocol 23 activated on mainnet on May 11, 2026, a week early, with a May 15 deadline for all nodes to upgrade. Protocol 23 is the most significant technical milestone since Open Mainnet, introducing full smart contract functionality on Pi Mainnet. This paves the way for Pi DEX, lending protocols, and the Pi Launchpad to move from testnet to live deployment. Subscription-based smart contracts, PiRC2, are already live on testnet, with further token standard upgrades planned.
In early May 2026, Kokkalis and Fan appeared at Consensus 2026, their first major public event in some time. They repositioned Pi as “human infrastructure for AI,” highlighting that Pi’s KYC-verified user base had completed over 526 million human verification tasks. This marked a shift from emphasizing mobile mining to focusing on a verified human identity layer.
The tier-1 exchange listing question remains unresolved. PI trades on OKX, Bitget, MEXC, Gate, Bitfinex, HTX, and others, but not on Binance or Coinbase. Binance’s community vote in early 2025 showed strong support for PI, but the exchange did not list. Kraken added PI to its 2026 roadmap with a tentative March 2026 listing date, conditional on Pi completing its open mainnet transition and satisfying Kraken’s review. As of late May 2026, the Kraken listing has not been finalized. Many smaller platforms still trade PI as IOU tokens, which can diverge from the native token price.
As of late May 2026, the key numbers are: PI price around $0.15, down 95% from its all-time high; market cap about $1.6 billion; circulating supply approximately 10.4 billion; user base over 60 million claimed, with about 19 million KYC-verified and 16 million migrated; smart contracts live on mainnet via Protocol 23; Pi DEX targeted for Q2 2026 mainnet launch; ecosystem includes Pi App Studio with mainnet PI payments, Pi Launchpad MVP on testnet, Chainlink integration, and ongoing developer programs.
Looking ahead, the next twelve months will focus on the mainnet rollout of smart contracts and the apps built on them, including Pi DEX and the Launchpad. Continued KYC expansion with biometric experiments aims to close the gap between claimed users and verified participants. The “human infrastructure for AI” pivot seeks to productize Pi’s verified-human dataset, though market reception is uncertain. The tier-1 exchange listing situation remains a key inflection point for liquidity. Meanwhile, the supply unlock dynamic continues to exert downward pressure as more PI enters circulation.
Pi Network in mid-2026 presents a dual narrative. On one hand, it has a documented record of shipping upgrades, expanding the ecosystem, and engaging its community through a steep drawdown. On the other hand, the price is 95% below its peak, tier-1 listings are absent, and structural supply growth absorbs demand. For users who have mined since 2019, the past fifteen months brought tangible progress: open mainnet, exchange listings, protocol upgrades, smart contracts. For those still waiting to migrate, the experience has been one of delays. For traders, PI remains a challenging instrument with constrained liquidity and persistent inflation. The next year will be defined by what the ecosystem produces with smart contracts, whether tier-1 listings materialize, and whether the human-verification infrastructure finds a market beyond Pi itself. That is the story so far.