On July 22, Pi Network launched its v25 protocol upgrade and a redesigned mobile app. The price of PI responded with a meek 3.5% bounce—a technicolor yawn in the midst of a 97% collapse from its peak. The crypto market was down 3% that day, so the nervous uptick was framed as a defiant rally. I see it differently: this is a dying project trying to dress a cadaver in new robes. The underlying tumor—a tokenomics model that bleeds 4.25 million new PI into circulation every single day—remains untouched. As someone who has spent the last 10 years in this industry, auditing failed projects from the ashes of 2022, I have learned one lesson: when a team reaches for a UX facelift while ignoring a structural supply crisis, they are not building; they are delaying the inevitable.
Let's strip away the marketing. Pi Network is a mobile mining application that has amassed tens of millions of users through the promise of free tokens. Its core pitch: anyone with a smartphone can mine PI without draining battery, running a node, or investing capital. The v25 upgrade promises improved network stability and the introduction of privacy-focused smart contracts. The app redesign reorganizes the user interface to streamline mining and, presumably, improve retention. These are incremental improvements—nothing radical. The real story lies in the mechanics that drive price, and here, the math is devastating.
The Tokenomics Trap The maximum supply of PI is capped at 100 billion tokens. Today, only about 10.9%—roughly 10.9 billion—are in circulation. The remaining 89.1 billion are locked in various contracts, including team allocations, early contributor rewards, and the mining pool. Every day, the protocol unlocks exactly 4.25 million PI and distributes it as mining rewards. That is a constant, unstoppable supply pressure. At current prices around $0.078, that daily unlock is worth approximately $331,500. To maintain price, the market must absorb that much new selling every 24 hours—plus any speculative profit-taking. There is no evidence that demand is growing anywhere close to this rate. In fact, trading volumes on the few exchanges that list PI remain thin, and the token has lost 97% of its value since its February 2025 peak of $2.15.
But the immediate daily unlock is only the appetizer. The real horror show is the long-term dilution. Over the next 5–10 years, assuming the current release schedule holds, nearly 90 billion tokens will flood the market. This is not a scaling solution; it is a Ponzi timetable. New entrants are paid with freshly minted coins that have no intrinsic value, and the only way for early adopters to realize gains is to sell to later buyers. Without genuine, external demand—such as transaction fees, governance utility, or ecosystem revenue—the price must trend toward zero. The v25 upgrade does nothing to change this. Privacy smart contracts are nice, but they don't create a reason for anyone to buy PI. They just add a new feature to a token that still has no job.
Consider the comparison to Bitcoin. Bitcoin's issuance rate halves every four years, a deliberate design to enforce scarcity. Over the next decade, Bitcoin's inflation rate will drop below 0.5%. Pi's inflation rate, even at today's circulating supply, is about 14% annually (4.25M * 365 / 10.9B). And that rate will stay high as the supply base grows. In five years, if the full 100 billion were magically distributed, the inflation would still be 1.5%—but that's a fantasy: the real pressure is the gradual dump over years. The Pi team could adjust the mining rate downward, but they haven't signaled any change. Instead, they focus on app redesign. That is a sign of a project that has run out of ideas on how to create value, so it polishes the window dressing.
The Technology Mirage V25 promises to introduce privacy smart contracts on Pi's own Layer 1. But Pi Network operates as a closed mainnet—it is not connected to Ethereum, Solana, or any other major chain. There is no bridge, no composability, no ability to leverage DeFi primitives. In blockchain, isolation is death. Without composability, a chain becomes a walled garden where users can only transact inside, and the only reason to stay is the hope that the garden gates will one day open. This is exactly why many mobile mining projects fail: they build a captive audience, but never deliver on interoperability. The redesign of the app—reordering the mining interface and adding a 'more intuitive' flow—suggests that user engagement is flagging. When a team has to simplify a screen that already had one button, you know retention is a problem.
From a technical standpoint, I have seen privacy smart contracts before—on Monero, on Zcash, on Aleo. These are non-trivial engineering challenges. Pi has not published any formal audit reports for v25. There is no public testnet for independent developers to stress test. The code is not open source. This is not decentralization; it is trust-me engineering. In the words of the Ethereum community, 'Don't trust, verify.' Pi asks for blind faith. My own experience auditing DeFi protocols during 2022 taught me that projects without transparency hide the highest risks. The collapse of Celsius and FTX were not sudden—they were preceded by opaque balance sheets and central control. Pi's lack of disclosure on token distribution, team credentials, and code integrity is a red flag that cannot be ignored.
The Market Speak The price action tells a clear story. PI hit an all-time high of $2.15 on February 25, 2025. By July 2025, it had fallen 97% to $0.064 before recovering slightly to $0.078. That is not volatility; it is a one-way liquidation. The 3.5% bounce on the v25 news is a dead cat bounce. In the past 30 days, PI is down 42%; in the past week, down 22%. The relative strength index is deeply oversold, but that does not mean the downtrend is over—it means the selling has been relentless. Volume is low, order books are shallow. The daily unlock of 4.25 million PI hangs over the market like a guillotine. Any speculative rebound is immediately sold into by miners who have been holding for years and see any price above zero as a gift.
Compare this to a project like Bitcoin in its early years. Bitcoin also had a high inflation rate, but it had a clear value proposition: censorship-resistant digital gold, backed by proof-of-work that required real energy expenditure. Pi's mining costs the user nothing—literally, the opportunity cost of a few taps per day. That means the marginal cost of production is zero. In economic terms, the natural price floor for a good with zero production cost is zero. The only reason PI has any value is the collective fiction that it will one day become a widely used currency. That fiction is being shattered by the steady flow of sellers.
The Centralization of Failure Pi Network's governance is completely centralized. The core team decides the mining rate, the upgrade schedule, the app design, and the token distribution. There is no DAO, no on-chain voting, no community treasury controlled by users. In my five years as a Web3 community founder, I have seen that centralized projects may launch quickly but they die slowly. Without a mechanism for users to hold the team accountable, trust erodes with every unexplained delay. The v25 upgrade is announced via blog post—no on-chain referendum, no community debate. This is the opposite of the decentralization ethos that blockchain was meant to enable.
Furthermore, the team remains partially anonymous. While the founders have been identified as Stanford graduates, many other developers are unknown. There is no public cap table, no transparency about how many tokens the team holds or when they might sell. I have written extensively about the moral hazard of opaque token distributions. Remember the FTX collapse? One of the key red flags was that the founding team held a majority of the native token and used it as collateral. Pi's structure makes that scenario all too plausible. Without independent audits or smart contract locks, the team could theoretically mint unlimited tokens or dump their stash on unsuspecting buyers.
The Contrarian Lens: Is v25 a Rational Pivot? Let me play devil's advocate. Suppose the Pi team genuinely believes that the key to adoption is usability, not tokenomics. They might argue that the current supply schedule is necessary to reward early adopters and that, once the network reaches critical mass through better UX and privacy features, demand will eventually catch up. This is the classic 'build it and they will come' narrative. But in the 2025 crypto landscape, that story is worn thin. There are hundreds of L1s and L2s, most with better technology, transparent teams, and actual DeFi ecosystems. Pi's user base, while large, consists largely of 'miners' who never had to risk anything. They are not investors; they are speculators waiting for a payout. The moment PI gets listed on a major exchange like Binance or Coinbase—if that ever happens—the selling pressure will be catastrophic. The v25 upgrade might be an attempt to build actual utility before that exodus, but it is too little, too late.
The contrarian could also argue that privacy smart contracts on a mobile-first chain could unlock use cases like private payments, anonymous social networks, or compliance-friendly identity solutions. But again, these require a vibrant developer community, and Pi has no evidence of one. Without composability with existing tools, developers have to build from scratch. The odds that a privacy-based killer dapp emerges on Pi in the next year are negligible. I have seen this pattern before—projects announce a pivot to a hot trend (privacy, AI, gaming) without addressing the underlying incentive crisis. It is death by pivot.
The Takeaway: A Lesson in Token Economics Pi Network is not a failure of technology; it is a failure of incentive design. 100 billion tokens with no demand function is a guaranteed race to zero. The v25 upgrade and app redesign are distractions. The core team knows this—they are buying time. For investors, PI should be a cautionary tale, not an investment thesis. The only rational play is to short via perpetual futures if liquidity allows, or to stay completely away. The token will likely continue to decline until it reaches a new equilibrium near zero, where only the most stubborn holders remain.
But there is a deeper lesson here for the entire industry: free tokens are not a business model. Value comes from utility—transaction fees, governance rights, yield-bearing assets. Pi created a vast user base but no revenue stream. It is a stark reminder that blockchain's true promise is not 'money for nothing,' but 'value for voluntary exchange.' As I wrote in my 2017 essay 'Code as Law: Why Decentralization Matters More Than Price,' the architecture must incentivize honest participation. Pi architecture incentivizes passive speculation. That is why it is dying.
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Trust is the only native currency—and Pi has none.
