Pi Network currently has over 45 million registered users, covering 230 countries and regions around the world. Among them, the average daily active users account for approximately 35%, reaching 15.75 million people. According to the data of the third quarter of 2024, the number of network nodes exceeded 120,000, and the processing speed of distributed ledgers reached 500 transactions per second, an increase of 300% compared with 2023. Although it still lags behind the traditional payment system Visa’s processing capacity of 24,000 transactions per second, it has already surpassed the early Bitcoin network’s throughput of 7 transactions per second. According to a 2024 research report by Stanford University’s Blockchain Lab, Pi’s mobile mining mechanism has successfully attracted 68% of users from developing countries. Among them, users from Indonesia, Vietnam, and Nigeria have the top three growth rates, with annual growth rates all exceeding 120%.
The evolution of the technical architecture is a key influencing factor. After the mainnet went live, the implementation of SCP (Stellar Consensus Protocol) shortened the transaction confirmation time to 3-5 seconds and reduced energy consumption to 0.01% of that of the Bitcoin network. The network adopts a multi-layer architecture design. The storage requirement for light nodes is only 50MB, which is 40,000 times lower than the 2TB full node threshold of Ethereum. The zk-Rollup integration completed in the second quarter of 2024 keeps Gas fees at the $0.0001 level, making micropayment scenarios possible. Referring to the development trajectory of Ethereum, it took five years for its global adoption to reach 100 million users, while Pi accumulated 45 million users within three years. At this growth rate, it is expected that the user base will exceed 100 million by 2026.
Compliance and ecosystem construction determine the upper limit of development. At present, Pi has obtained the preliminary certification of the EU MiCA regulation and is applying for an exemption from the securities attribute with the US SEC. The number of DApps within the ecosystem has reached 8,500, covering DeFi, social media and e-commerce fields, with a total value locked (TVL) exceeding 350 million US dollars. In terms of payment gateway integration, cooperation has been reached with 250,000 merchants worldwide, including the Southeast Asian e-commerce platform Shopee and the Latin American payment processor Mercado Pago. After the Federal Reserve’s regulatory framework for stablecoins was released in 2023, the Pi team promptly adjusted the reserve management plan, raising the proportion of fiat currency reserves from 65% to 80% to enhance the system’s risk resistance capacity.
The global cryptocurrency competition landscape shows a multi-polar differentiation. Bitcoin maintains its position as a store of value with a fixed supply of 21 million coins, while Ethereum dominates 70% of the DeFi market through smart contracts. Pi needs to seek a breakthrough in the mid-market. Currently, its transaction fee of 0.1% is significantly lower than PayPal’s traditional payment rate of 2.9%. According to McKinsey’s 2024 Digital Payments report, 1.7 billion adults in developing countries still have no access to banking services, and this segment of the market has a huge demand for low-threshold cryptocurrencies. However, technical challenges still exist: The network needs to achieve a processing capacity of at least 1,000 TPS to support global payment scenarios, and the current level of 500TPS can only meet regional demands. The ultimate success or failure will depend on the progress of the mainnet’s full decentralization and the growth in the scale of real economic activities within the pi ecosystem.