Expected to “go public” at the end of 2024, but the Pi Network team has not made any new moves, disappointing players.
“Since mid-2024, there has been information that Pi Core Team – the Pi Network development team – is doing everything to ‘open mainnet’ by the end of the year. Even though I have stopped activating lightning, I still hope to open the network so I can trade outside,” said Hoai Thu, a Pi Network virtual currency player in Binh Duong. “A countdown clock appearing on the app interface makes me even more hopeful.”
Launched in 2019, the Pi Network project is still in the “closed mainnet” phase, which only allows players to exchange with each other, and cannot be transferred to buy and sell on cryptocurrency exchanges, which the community calls “open mainnet”. Thu said that she and her group of friends no longer use the smartphone app to check in. However, because there are more than 1,000 “purple Pi”, which can be exchanged between internal wallets, she still hopes that this virtual currency will be listed on exchanges. “Only then will Pi truly have value,” she said.
Hoang Thanh, another Pi Network player in Quang Ngai, is also waiting as he invested more than VND500 million to build a computer cluster running Pi Node at the end of last year. “I spent hundreds of millions of VND on operating costs, but everything is uncertain. The reward system sometimes works, sometimes doesn’t, sometimes has errors,” he said. “In December 2024, I decided to unplug my computer and start liquidating PCs running Pi Node. With the amount of Pi I have mined, I hope the ‘mainnet opens’ to sell enough to recoup the money I invested.”
After 2023 with mixed feelings, Pi Network players are now quieter and less active. There are only a few silent exchanges in the form of “consensus”, but the majority admit to being scammed when following the scammer’s path.
The delay of the Pi Core Team, while Nicolas Kokkalis – the man believed to be behind the Pi Network project – has not appeared in any media for more than three years, is making players skeptical about the project. It was not until July 2024 that Kokkalis posted a reassuring video, adding the job title “working at Pi Network” to his LinkedIn profile.
Not only Kokkalis, co-founder Chengdiao Fan has also been inactive. Her X account provided on the Pi Network website has no activity when accessed. The project’s X account alone still posts 2-3 articles per week. Another co-founder, Vincent McPhillip, left in February 2021.
At the end of June 2024, the Pi Core Team announced that this virtual currency project had 60 million network participants, an increase of nearly 10 million compared to three months earlier, and transferred about 10 million people to the “closed mainnet” system.
The team also mentioned “open mainnet” for the first time, when giving a series of conditions including: completing an open network in terms of technology, products, business and legality for Pi; achieving KYC (identity verification) goals; needing “a favorable environment that does not hinder the success of the open mainnet”. At that time, some cryptocurrency experts assessed that these conditions “will take a long time to implement”.
The team said that Pi2Day (June 28) in 2024 “could be the last Pi2Day before the mainnet opens.” However, Hoka News at the time suggested that this could be a “time-wasting” tactic by the project. This announcement later frustrated players even more, with some even calling for the app to be deleted.
Since then, the Pi Network team has made no further announcements indicating that an “open mainnet” will be launched soon. The biggest change was the addition of Fireside, a Web3 social network for the community of players in June, but it also did not attract attention.
Additionally, the mobile app interface features a countdown timer with an end time of December 31, 2024, leading some to speculate that this is the “mainnet open” date. After this deadline, nothing has changed.
In the announcement on December 23, 2024, the Pi Core Team continued to promise. “To help prepare the network and accelerate the progress of Pi going open network, we are extending the deadline to complete KYC and move to mainnet before January 31, 2025,” the announcement said. At the same time, the content also showed that Pi Network “will launch open network in Q1/2025”.
Pi Network is a project advertised to help users own free Pi virtual currency, by logging in to the phone application every day. However, the project is controversial because after 6 years, it still does not allow users to trade on cryptocurrency exchanges.
At the end of June 2023, the Ministry of Public Security said it had coordinated with local police to investigate activities related to the virtual currency Pi. According to the Ministry’s representative, activities related to Pi in Vietnam show signs of enticement, with money from the previous person paying the next person in a binary, multi-level business model, so people need to be cautious about the behavior of being enticed to participate in the virtual currency model with unusually high profits.
