Hook
While the broader crypto market shed 3% in the past 24 hours, Pi Coin—the native token of the famously mobile-mined Pi Network—bucked the trend with a modest 3.5% gain. To the untrained eye, this looks like a vote of confidence. But the ledger remembers what the hype forgets: Pi Coin is still down 97% from its all-time high reached in February 2025. Over the last month, it has cratered 42%; over the past week, another 22%. This so-called rally is nothing but a dead cat bounce on a token that faces 4.25 million new coins unlocked every single day. The market is not buying the narrative that a routine protocol upgrade and a mobile app redesign will fix the fundamental cancer eating Pi from within.
Context
Pi Network launched in 2019 as a mobile-first cryptocurrency project that allowed users to mine coins for free by simply pressing a button every 24 hours. Its marketing genius—tapping into the mobile phone penetration of billions—built a user base that the projects' founders claim is in the tens of millions. Yet for years, Pi has operated in what it calls a “closed mainnet.” Users can mine and transact within the walled garden, but there is no bridge to Ethereum or any major exchange without a central gatekeeper. The token, with a hard cap of 100 billion PI, currently has only about 10.9% of that supply in circulation—roughly 10.9 billion coins. The remaining 89.1 billion are either locked in team wallets, held for future distribution, or yet to be mined. Every day, 4.25 million new PI enter circulation via mining rewards. That is a steady, relentless sell pressure that no amount of app redesign can mask.
Core
On July 22, 2025, the Pi Core Team plans to deploy the v25 protocol upgrade alongside a redesigned mobile application. The upgrade promises “improved stability” and the addition of “privacy smart contracts.” The app overhaul will reorder the user interface for what the team calls a “better user experience.” These are the kind of incremental updates that any living blockchain project does every few months—nothing revolutionary.
But let’s cut through the code. Based on my experience auditing ICO tokenomics in 2017, I know that the most dangerous projects are the ones that hide massive supply cliffs behind user-friendly applications. Pi Network is a textbook case. The v25 upgrade does not change the fundamental math: 89.1 billion tokens are still locked, and the daily unlock rate of 4.25 million is not slowing. At current prices around $0.078, that’s roughly $332,000 in new sell pressure every day. Without a mechanism to absorb that supply—whether through staking, fee burning, or genuine economic activity—the token will continue its grind toward zero. The 3.5% price jump is a brief spark, not a fire.
Bridging the gap between code and community: privacy smart contracts sound exciting, but Pi Network is not Ethereum. It does not support composability, it has no DeFi ecosystem, and its developers—aside from the core team—are essentially non-existent. The network is a silo. Even if v25 introduces smart contract capability, who will build on it? The community is made up of speculators waiting for an exchange listing, not developers. The ledger remembers that dozens of “Ethereum killers” launched with higher throughput, better tooling, and VC backing, yet most are dead. Pi has none of that.
Contrarian Angle
The contrarian take in the room says that v25 could be the trigger that finally opens the mainnet and allows Pi to trade freely on major centralized exchanges. The argument: a new smart contract layer makes the network more palatable for exchanges like Binance or Coinbase to list PI, and the app redesign signals that the team is serious about onboarding real users. If that happens, the argument goes, the immense user base will flood in to buy, sending the price parabolic.
I call this the “narrative trap.” The same logic was used in 2021 when Pi first promised an open mainnet. It never materialized. Transparency is the only consensus that lasts, and Pi Core Team remains one of the most opaque governance structures in crypto. No verified token distribution. No public team bios beyond the Stanford founders. No on-chain governance. The team could change the protocol, halt mining, or even freeze tokens at will. There is no trust-minimized code.
Even if an exchange listing happened tomorrow, it would likely be a “buy the rumor, sell the news” event. The 4.25 million daily unlocks would be funneled through exchange order books, and the initial rush of buying from believers would soon be overwhelmed by the sheer weight of supply. We saw this play out with other heavily mined coins—Uniswap’s initial distribution had a similar, albeit smaller, structure, but Uniswap has billions in trading fees to support its token. Pi has zero revenue.
Takeaway
I have covered crypto cycles since 2017. I have seen projects with hot narratives and slick apps collapse under the weight of their tokenomics. Pi Network is writing that same story, and v25 is only the latest chapter. The question is not whether this upgrade will boost price—it’s whether the team can conjure billions of dollars of genuine demand before the unlocking schedule turns every holder into a seller. My bet? The ledger remembers what the hype forgets: without utility, supply always wins. Watch for the unlock rate to slow—if it does, maybe there’s a chance. Until then, the only smart move is to stay out of the mine.
