On February 20, 2025, after more than six years of mobile mining and three years of closed mainnet operation, Pi Network finally dropped its firewall and let PI trade.
Summary
- Pi Network opened its mainnet firewall on February 20, 2025, allowing PI to trade externally.
- PI reached an all-time high of $2.99 after launch before falling near $0.15 by May 2026.
- Protocol 23 activated smart contracts on Pi Mainnet, opening the path for Pi DEX and Launchpad.
- Pi still faces tier-1 exchange gaps, KYC migration delays, and supply unlock pressure.
Fifteen months later, the price has settled around $0.15, smart contracts have just gone live on mainnet, and the project is in the middle of a major protocol upgrade. The story between those two points is dense, and most readers have never seen it laid out in one place. This is the chronology, sourced where possible to Pi’s own announcements, of what Pi Network has done since opening the gate.
The starting point
To make sense of where Pi sits in May 2026, it helps to remember where it began.
Pi Network started in 2019 as a mobile app from a group of Stanford-affiliated researchers, with founders Nicolas Kokkalis and Chengdiao Fan still at the helm today. The pitch was unusual from the start. Pi would be a cryptocurrency ordinary people could mine on a smartphone, without specialized hardware, without significant electricity costs, and without making users learn the technical layer.
Trust would be established through a “Security Circle” model, where users vouched for other users they knew personally, building a social trust graph the consensus mechanism could use as a Sybil resistance layer. Pi’s consensus would be a modified version of the Stellar Consensus Protocol, federated rather than mined in the energy-intensive Bitcoin sense.
The community grew quickly. By late 2024, Pi reported over 60 million users across 230-plus countries, with the largest concentrations in Asia and Africa. The app required users to open it once every 24 hours and tap a button to confirm they were active, and that gesture was, in Pi’s design, the user’s “mining” contribution. There were no real tokens being transferred, no on-chain activity for these users, until KYC and mainnet migration.
In December 2021, Pi launched what it called Enclosed Mainnet, a live blockchain that ran behind a firewall. Users who completed KYC could migrate their mined PI to mainnet wallets, but those wallets could not connect to external exchanges or wallets. The Enclosed Mainnet phase was Pi’s longest, lasting just over three years. The Core Team published three conditions that needed to be met before the firewall could come down: sufficient KYC completion across the user base, a developed ecosystem of utility applications, and favorable external market conditions.
In February 2025, Pi judged those conditions met. The Open Mainnet was set for February 20.
February 20, 2025: the firewall drops
At 8:00 AM UTC on February 20, 2025, Pi Network enabled external connectivity. PI tokens could now leave Pi wallets and move to exchanges, swap protocols, and external wallets. Several major exchanges, including OKX, Bitget, MEXC, and Gate, listed PI on the same day, either as the native token or initially as IOU tokens that settled into native PI as the network connected.
Trading opened at approximately $1.47. Within hours, the price ran to $2.10 on intense initial demand. By the end of the first trading day, it had settled at roughly $1.01. In the weeks that followed, as more exchanges connected and more migrated PI became liquid, the price reached an all-time high of $2.99 in late February 2025. The early excitement reflected years of pent-up demand from a community that, for many users, had been mining daily since 2019.
The initial price discovery also produced the first all-time low. On the same February 20 trading day, intraday volatility briefly took PI to $0.049 as liquidity gaps and panic selling met the wall of newly liquid supply. The wick was short, but it became part of the chart.
Two structural features of the launch shaped everything that followed.
First, the migrated supply at launch was a small fraction of the eventual circulating supply. Of Pi’s 100 billion maximum supply, only a small percentage was in mainnet wallets on day one. The rest would migrate as more users completed KYC and as the network processed second migrations and validator rewards over time. This created a structural inflation dynamic: every subsequent month, more PI would enter circulation, regardless of demand.
Second, the most prominent exchanges, Binance and Coinbase, did not list at launch. Binance had run a community vote in early 2025 in which PI received strong support, but the exchange did not act on the vote. Coinbase made no announcement. For a community used to anticipating tier-1 listings, this was the first signal that Open Mainnet would not be the end of the wait.
The early months: price discovery and the post-launch correction
From its February ATH, PI began a long decline. By mid-2025, the price had fallen below $1. By late 2025, it was trading in the $0.40 to $0.60 range. By February 2026, the first anniversary of Open Mainnet, PI traded around $0.187. By mid-May 2026, it sits near $0.15, with a market capitalization of approximately $1.6 billion and a CoinMarketCap rank around #55.
Several factors drove the decline, and they map cleanly onto the structural features above.
The supply unlock schedule was, and remains, a steady headwind. As Pi processed second migrations, validator rewards, and referral bonuses through 2025 and 2026, more PI entered circulation each month. With circulating supply rising and demand limited by the absence of tier-1 exchange access, the structural pressure on price was downward. As of mid-2026, roughly 10.4 billion PI circulate out of the 100 billion maximum supply, meaning about 90 percent of the eventual supply has not yet entered the market.
Demand was constrained by the listing situation. PI traded on tier-2 exchanges, but the absence of Binance and Coinbase meant institutional and high-volume retail traders never gained easy access. Trading volume on Pi-listed exchanges stayed modest relative to the project’s user base. As of late May 2026, PI’s daily volume sits in the $1.5 million to $25 million range depending on the source, a fraction of what comparable rank-50 tokens see.
Broader crypto market conditions during 2025 were mixed. Bitcoin reached new all-time highs in late 2025 before correcting sharply in early 2026, and the altcoin market followed a similar pattern. PI’s decline was steeper than Bitcoin’s, but the macro context was not supportive for any speculative altcoin during the late-2025 to mid-2026 window.
The KYC backlog: a story that defines the user experience
Running underneath the price story was a quieter, more human one: the KYC backlog.
Pi requires users to complete identity verification before they can migrate their mined tokens to mainnet wallets. The process became a bottleneck in 2025 as the user base scaled faster than the verification system.
As of late 2025, Pi reported approximately 19 million KYC-verified users and around 16 million who had successfully migrated to mainnet, out of a claimed user base of more than 60 million. That left a large share of users in “tentative” status, neither verified nor migrated, with their mined PI inaccessible.
Pi addressed parts of the problem through 2025 and 2026. The Core Team removed a 30-day waiting period for new users, expanded KYC validator rewards to incentivize community-driven verification, and made an additional 2.5 million users eligible for migration in January 2026.
By early 2026, Pi was experimenting with palm-based authentication as a new biometric verification option. The Pi Day 2026 announcement on March 14 highlighted “Second migrations” and “KYC Validator rewards” as priorities, indicating the backlog remained an active focus.
The KYC story is dual-edged in the Pi narrative. For Pi, it is the foundation of the project’s identity layer and Sybil resistance, the same feature the Core Team has begun positioning as “human infrastructure for AI,” a verified-human dataset that could underpin AI training or verification services in the future. For unverified users, particularly those in regions with less common ID formats, the experience has often been one of long waits and unclear outcomes. Both readings of the same fact pattern coexist in the Pi community.
Ecosystem development through 2025
Alongside the migration and listing dynamics, Pi continued to build its ecosystem. The pace varied, and outside observers and Pi enthusiasts often weighted the same milestones differently, but the chronology is documentable.
Throughout 2025, Pi rolled out several ecosystem initiatives. The Pi App Studio launched as a low-code platform letting developers, and even non-technical users, build apps within the Pi ecosystem. A November 2025 update added source code export and more advanced development capabilities.
PiFest, a recurring event encouraging merchants to accept PI as payment, expanded through 2025, with Pi reporting over 100,000 merchants signed up to participate in at least one PiFest period. Real-world adoption beyond the Pi community remained limited, but the experiments produced documented examples of users paying for goods and services in PI.
The Pi Launchpad was announced as a planned product for ecosystem token launches, with a Minimum Viable Product appearing on Testnet during Q1 2026. The Launchpad is meant to let projects built on Pi issue utility tokens, with the design subject to community feedback during the Testnet period.
A Chainlink integration was announced in 2025, intended to bring oracle services to the Pi ecosystem and enable price feeds for future DeFi applications on the network. The integration’s practical impact remained pending on the smart contract upgrade that would follow.
Testnet1 began phased protocol upgrades through 2025, reaching version 23 on September 18, 2025, as a staging ground for the eventual Mainnet upgrade.
Pi Day 2026 and the protocol upgrade cycle
March 14, 2026, was Pi Day, the project’s annual milestone moment. Pi Day 2026 brought one of the densest batches of announcements in the project’s history.
The headline release was the Pi Launchpad MVP on Testnet, letting developers and projects experiment with the token-issuance pipeline ahead of mainnet deployment. Pi App Studio gained the ability to integrate Mainnet PI payments, opening a path for apps built on Pi to transact in actual PI rather than test tokens. The Pi Core Team also detailed an accelerated protocol upgrade roadmap, with Protocol 20.2 already deployed and a multi-stage upgrade path leading to Protocol 23.
The upgrade cadence over the following weeks was deliberate. Protocol 21.2 deployed on April 6, 2026. Protocol 22.1 followed on April 22. Protocol 22 was confirmed on Mainnet on April 27. Protocol 23 was activated on Mainnet on May 11, 2026, a week earlier than initially planned, with a deadline of May 15 for all mainnet nodes to complete the upgrade or risk losing network connectivity.
Protocol 23 is the most significant technical milestone since Open Mainnet itself. It introduces full smart contract functionality on Pi Mainnet, opening the door for the project’s first decentralized exchange, Pi DEX, lending protocols, and the Pi Launchpad to move from Testnet to live deployment. Pi has confirmed that subscription-based smart contracts, PiRC2, are already live on Testnet, and that further token standard upgrades, PiRC1, are planned in later releases.
In early May 2026, Pi’s founders Kokkalis and Fan appeared at Consensus 2026, one of the largest events in the global crypto industry. Their appearance was the first major public-facing event by the founders in some time and came alongside a renewed positioning of Pi as “human infrastructure for AI,” highlighting that Pi’s KYC-verified user base had completed over 526 million human verification tasks across the network.
The framing represented a shift in how the Core Team described Pi’s long-term value proposition, moving from “mobile-mined cryptocurrency” toward “verified human identity layer.”
The exchange listing question
The single most-asked question in the Pi community throughout the past fifteen months has been about tier-1 exchange listings, and the answer is still partial.
PI trades on a growing list of exchanges. OKX listed at Open Mainnet launch. Bitget, MEXC, and Gate followed. Bitfinex, HTX, and others added PI in the months that followed. Smaller and regional exchanges expanded coverage through 2025 and 2026. PI’s listing footprint by mid-2026 is broader than at launch, though it stays concentrated outside the very top tier of global exchanges.
Binance held its community vote in early 2025. PI received strong support in the vote, but Binance did not list. The exchange has not made public statements explaining the decision or providing a timeline. Coinbase has made no public commitment.
Kraken added PI to its 2026 roadmap, with a tentative March 2026 listing date that was widely reported in the Pi community. The listing was conditional on Pi completing its transition to Open Mainnet, which had already occurred, and on satisfying Kraken’s internal review process. As of late May 2026, the Kraken listing has not been completed.
Many smaller platforms continue to trade PI as IOU tokens, synthetic representations of PI not backed by Pi Core Team, rather than the native token. The IOU versus native PI distinction matters: an IOU is essentially a promise to deliver PI on certain conditions, and its price can drift from the underlying. For users figuring out where to trade, the difference is operationally significant.
The numbers, in May 2026
To put all of this in one place, the verifiable state of Pi Network as of late May 2026:
PI price: approximately $0.15, down from a $2.99 all-time high in February 2025, a drawdown of approximately 95 percent from peak.
Market capitalization: approximately $1.6 billion, ranking around #55 across all cryptocurrencies.
Circulating supply: approximately 10.4 billion PI of a 100 billion maximum supply.
User base: 60+ million claimed, with approximately 19 million KYC-verified and approximately 16 million migrated to Mainnet as of late 2025/early 2026, with second migrations continuing.
Smart contracts: live on Testnet, activated on Mainnet via Protocol 23 on May 11, 2026.
Pi DEX: targeted for Q2 2026 Mainnet launch.
Ecosystem: Pi App Studio operational with Mainnet PI payments, Pi Launchpad MVP on Testnet, Chainlink integration in place, dApp development ongoing through the Pi Hackathon and developer programs.
Tier-1 exchange listings: none confirmed. Tier-2 listings include OKX, Bitget, MEXC, Gate, Bitfinex, HTX, and others.
What the next twelve months hold
Pi has not been quiet about what is next, and the roadmap is concrete enough to lay out.
The first item is the Mainnet rollout of smart contracts, now technically live, and the apps that will be built on top of them. Pi DEX, Pi Launchpad, lending protocols, and other DeFi primitives are the immediately visible next layer. Whether this layer produces meaningful utility, and how quickly, will depend on developer adoption and the design choices the Core Team makes during the Testnet feedback cycle.
The second is the continued KYC expansion, including biometric experiments and validator-reward incentives, with the goal of narrowing the gap between claimed user base and verified mainnet participants.
The third is the “human infrastructure for AI” pivot. If Pi succeeds in productizing its verified-human dataset, whether as a verification service for other crypto projects, an identity layer for AI training and authentication, or another adjacent product, it would represent a significant repositioning of the project’s value proposition. Whether the market values that pivot remains to be seen.
The fourth is the exchange listing situation. The next tier-1 listing, if and when it comes, will be a meaningful inflection point for liquidity and price discovery. Whether that happens in 2026 or later is, like much else with Pi, uncertain.
The fifth is the supply unlock dynamic. As more users complete KYC and migrate, circulating supply keeps growing against a finite demand pool. This is the structural headwind on price, and it does not resolve quickly even under favorable scenarios.
How to read all of this
Pi Network in May 2026 is a project with a documentable record of shipping. The protocol has upgraded. Smart contracts are live. The Launchpad is on Testnet. The founders appeared at the industry’s largest event. The ecosystem is broader than it was at Open Mainnet. The user base is larger. The KYC backlog has narrowed.
It is also a project where the price is 95 percent below its launch-day peak, where tier-1 exchange listings remain elusive, and where structural supply growth keeps absorbing demand. The same fact pattern supports both readings.
For users who have been mining since 2019, the past fifteen months have brought concrete movement: Open Mainnet, exchange listings, protocol upgrades, smart contracts, an expanding ecosystem. For users still waiting to migrate, the experience has often been one of waiting, with mined PI inaccessible behind unresolved KYC status. For traders, PI has been a difficult instrument: a token with a real ecosystem and a real community but constrained liquidity, persistent supply inflation, and an unclear path to broader exchange access.
The Open Mainnet anniversary is a useful moment to take stock not because it marks an endpoint, but because it lets the chronology be assembled in one place. Pi is what it is in mid-2026: a multi-year project that opened its gate, shipped real upgrades, kept its community engaged through a steep drawdown, and faces a set of genuine open questions about exchange listings, supply dynamics, ecosystem adoption, and the AI-infrastructure pivot.
The next year of Pi’s story will be written by what the ecosystem actually produces now that smart contracts are live, whether the tier-1 listings that have not yet materialized eventually do, and whether the human-verification infrastructure finds a market beyond Pi itself. The infrastructure is in place. What gets built on top is the part the Core Team, the developer community, and the Pioneers themselves are now working out, in public, day by day.
That is what actually happened. The rest is for time to tell.
This article is for informational purposes and does not constitute financial or investment advice. Cryptocurrency markets are volatile and project roadmaps can change quickly; the figures and milestones described reflect reporting available as of mid-May 2026. Always do your own research.
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