Pi Network (PI) Review: Why I Think It Is Going to Zero

My answer on Pi Network (PI) is that it is going to zero, and I would not buy it at any price. I said this in June 2024 in my first review, and I said it again in June 2026, the day the mainnet launched. The second call is the one I stand behind most, because the core problems I raised in 2024 were still there once the token finally went live.

Three things drive the call. The first is valuation. In the 2026 post I pointed to a market cap of about $5.5 billion against a fully diluted valuation of $91 billion, which I said was higher than Solana at the time. The second is the mining pitch, which asks people to download an app and mine on their phones for little or nothing. The third is the people and numbers behind it, which I could not verify. Those are the reasons, and the rest of this page is the evidence for each.

My view started in 2024. Back then the mainnet was not live, the token was being traded through unauthorized exchanges and IOUs that were not necessarily transferable, and the claimed numbers did not match each other. The project put circulating supply at about 58 million Pi, roughly 60 percent, next to a fully diluted market cap of $3 trillion that I could not explain. A viewer in my Twitch chat, MightyAkimbo, told me he had mined for six months on four PCs and three Raspberry Pi and earned less than a dollar of Pi, and he reported that the app showed 11 million members while the website claimed 55 million. I also flagged what looked like bot activity on X and YouTube, and a KYC step you had to pass before using it. You can see the full reasoning in my 2024 Pi review.

The June 2026 launch post is the newer view, and it is where the case gets sharper. The mainnet went live that month, but the blocks came roughly five seconds apart with maybe 20 or 30 transactions in them, and I pointed to just 35 core team members worldwide for a project with a valuation that large. I also read the comments, a lot of which were negative, including people saying years of mining had earned them nothing. My price call in that launch post was that the token would most likely go much lower, and that I would not be surprised to see it at $0.10, or even near $0.01, within a few months. Past calls keep their dates, and that one is from June 2026.

The test I keep coming back to is whether a token has a real reason to be held. Pi's pitch is that you can mine it on your phone, and I do not see that as useful technology. My comparison point is the Internet Computer. OpenChat runs fully on-chain, and ICP governance is on-chain too, so holders can vote on the upgrades that matter, which is a real reason to hold it. You can read that case in my Internet Computer hub. Solana is the other benchmark, since I measured Pi's valuation against it, and my Solana page covers how I look at its economics.

I want to be fair to the other side. Bitcoin is also slow next to those block times, and it has a lot of money and attention behind it. My point is narrower: a coin that wants to be a real alternative has to be technically much better than what it is trying to replace, and in my research Pi did not show that. I have researched thousands of altcoins over 10 years in crypto, and my experience says most of it is a ripoff. The questions I would ask before buying any new launch are who is building it, whether the engagement is real, and what the token actually does.

Below this opening you will find a contents list, then both Pi posts in full, newest first. Read the 2026 launch post for where my view stands now, then the 2024 review for the earlier evidence on mining, team and bots. If you are holding PI right now and want a second opinion, you can get a personal video review from me at https://jerrybanfield.com/review/.

Pi Network Launches: Why My Price Prediction Is $0

From my video published June 17, 2026.

Pi Network's mainnet just launched, and I see a rug pull

Pi Network's mainnet just launched today, and to me this looks like an absolute rug pull, headed toward zero, a terrible investment. I'm writing this because I'm tired of seeing people get ripped off on things that are obviously horrible, and I hope at least one person can see through this deception. So many of you have been asking me: what about Pi? It just launched. Well, I see some huge problems with it right now.

First, the market cap. According to the CoinMarketCap page they obviously paid to submit, it's $5.5 billion, but the fully diluted valuation is $91 billion. For context, that is higher than Solana right now. In my view, you are almost guaranteed to lose money on this. If I had any of these coins, I would dump them immediately, because my honest price prediction is that this is going toward zero. I wouldn't be surprised to see it down at $0.10, or even close to $0.01, over the next few months.

The real question is this: is the technology truly valuable, or is this just another pump-and-dump crypto mafia ripoff coin, which in my experience 99.99% of crypto turns out to be? From what I see, this absolutely is the latter.

Mining crypto on your phone is a stupid concept

The Pi Network has finally launched the Pi blockchain. If you go to their website at minepi.com, which is linked on the CoinMarketCap page, it says this is the first digital currency you can mine on your phone. Let's back up for a minute. This sounds good, doesn't it? Oh, you can mine it on your phone. But let's think it through a little more. You're just going to have people all over the world mining it. Proof-of-work mining, and mining on a phone, is, in my opinion, a stupid concept. It's ridiculous. I see no value in it. It's a great narrative to trick people into thinking something real is happening, but proof-of-work mining is massively wasteful. Your phone is already a big enough distraction. You've already got enough stuff to do on it. And really, you're all just going to be mining this on your phone, and then how is that going to work out? Is there going to be any integrity in it? What about people who get networks of thousands of phones together and rip the network off?

The site says it won't drain your battery. To me, that's obviously a lie, and I'm sure there's some technical truth behind the claim, but I don't see that this is fundamentally useful technology. Why would anybody who's not already involved open this app and start trying to get crypto on their phone? I've heard from people who actually used this before the blockchain launched, and they put in tons of energy, time, and effort trying to mine Pi on their phone and they earned nothing. To me, you're just suckers for getting tricked into downloading something like this. And the only relief, once you realize you're a sucker, is to stop playing that game. I used to go to the casino and gamble, and the solution there was the same: stop going to the casino and cash out.

The blockchain itself looks slow and weak

If you look at the blockchain now that it's launched, this is maximum hype, and there's a block roughly every five seconds. That's slow. It's one bad thing after another that I see here. Right now you have only a few transactions, maybe 20 or 30, and blocks about five seconds apart. If you don't know anything about crypto, you have nothing to compare that to. But there is the Internet Computer that does thousands of transactions a second, and it's powering entire social networks like my OpenChat, fully on-chain. The governance for ICP is also fully on-chain, which means there's a real point to holding the token: you can hold it and go in and vote on the things that actually upgrade the network.

When you compare that to Pi Network, I don't see any reason you would hold the token, even if you did waste your time, download the app, try to mine it on your phone, and actually get something. And it doesn't even look like there are that many blocks you can get right now. Imagine there were a bunch of people mining it on their phones; there still aren't very many blocks, just one every five seconds. That's super slow compared to the Internet Computer Protocol, which sends a transaction in half a second. It's slow compared to Solana. At this point it's ridiculous to expect people to use technology inferior to Solana. Solana sucks in my opinion, but at least the transactions land in half a second. So why would anyone in their right mind, which most people in crypto are not, settle for five-second blocks on Pi Network?

I know Bitcoin's blocks are slower, but Bitcoin already has Wall Street, and it already has a whole lot of money and people behind it pushing it. To me, the only way to have a real alternative to Bitcoin is to build something vastly technologically superior. This is not that.

Inflated communities and a tiny team

The site says, ask our community of over 60 million engaged humans. I don't see any proof that there are 60 million engaged humans. And if it's something you can just run and mine on your phone, it's easy to build. They say, don't worry if you're new to blockchain or Web3 development, it simplifies the process for you. But you can't really build anything directly on the blockchain. As with all these other blockchains, you have to build almost everything on regular Web2 infrastructure and then connect the blockchain in. That's useless to me. And this has already been around with Pi Network for five years.

If you look at the "who we are" section, after five years there are two people: one guy is the head of technology, and the other is the head of product, who appears to have a PhD in anthropological sciences. So maybe one actual engineer on this project? This looks like something that was pretty easy to create, and in my view they're just stealing from you. There are only 35 core team members globally for a project with a market cap as big as Solana's fully diluted valuation. I believe you're going to get dumped on badly. I've gone back and watched my old videos, and I'm almost always right. Almost always.

The social media looks grossly inflated with bots

Their social media appears to be grossly inflated with bots: 3.5 million members, 3.8 million followers, and only one account following. These cryptos use a playbook where they do all the same things to manipulate numbers and cheat and lie to you, and this looks like they've gone harder than most with bots. You can see it because with real organic content there tends to be significant diversity in how many comments and posts each thing gets. But look at these two posts: 5,000 comments, 6,000 retweets, 25,000 likes; then 5,000 comments again within a few hundred, 4,000 retweets, 26,000 likes. Do you see it? That's bots or ads, but more than likely bots. They're just faking and committing fraud.

If you go into the actual comments, it looks like they've paid a bunch of people to hype this up, but a lot of the comments are pretty negative. Things like: "You're sleeping last few years, clowns." "Your maintenance is not working." Then still, "Pi pioneers are all winners." "Pi coin launched today, not one word about it from the network leaders, what am I missing here?" "Definitely five years of disciplined mining should be worth a few words from you guys." "Well, that went well, what a waste of all those years mining." You should be reading this stuff before you buy anything.

People have repeatedly told me, in my Twitch chat, in my OpenChat, and in my YouTube comments, that this is the actual experience: years of trying to mine Pi, and nothing in return. You can see how fake this is when you compare what people are actually saying in the comments versus what the project claims. This is how so many of you get lied to, because many researching wouldn't even look at the X account to begin with. And if you did, all you'd see is a lot of activity, and you'd think, oh, that's legit, great, the website looks fine, I see transactions. But a lot of you wouldn't do more than glance at a price chart.

My bottom line on Pi

So, in my belief, 99.9% of the time the price for this will be much lower than it is today. This is an extremely dangerous crypto. Under no circumstances would I buy it. It's an absolute dumpster fire. Unlike anyone who's hyping this up, I'm not getting paid to say any of this. I'm telling you because I care about you and I don't want you to get stolen from. If you want to think more carefully about where your money goes before chasing the next launch, I share a lot more of how I look at this in my Crypto Reviews playlist.

Pi Network (PI) Crypto Review: Why I Think It's Going to Zero

From my video published June 20, 2024.

Pi Network is a crypto investment that, to me, looks like it's going to zero. I see some serious problems with this. There's no way I would buy this, and I imagine almost everyone who does anything with Pi is going to lose their time and money. I'm going to show you why I'm saying that here, plus much better alternatives.

Pi Network has been around for years and years and years, and they still don't even have their mainnet launched yet. If you go to the CoinMarketCap page, you'll notice there's been some serious issues with exchanges offering IOUs that are not necessarily transferable. It had a price spike up to hundreds of dollars and then dumped the value. Right off the bat, this is crazy. You don't even know if these numbers are actually accurate.

The tokenomics don't make sense

According to the project, it has a circulating supply of 60%, around 58 million Pi. And according to this, the fully diluted market cap, for some reason, is $3 trillion. So the mainnet's not even open, and you've got a $3 trillion fully diluted valuation attached to it. I've seen influencers hyping this up, but I can find no quality of substance on it.

If you look into Pi, there's unauthorized exchanges adding it, which is really sketchy. And if you go to the actual team and look at what makes Pi Network unique, the thing they point to is mining.

The mining is a complete waste of time

On my Twitch chat, somebody named MightyAkimbo, who's been using this, said that he tried mining for six months with four PCs and three Raspberry Pi, and only accumulated less than a dollar's worth of Pi. On its website, it's saying this is the first digital currency you can mine on your phone, and that's making it out like it's a big deal. But then if you look at the reality, people have been mining a whole bunch of it and it's been a complete waste. Others have been mining for years and got maybe $50.

So the mining, while they're making it out like this is something you can just mine on your phone, looks, from what I'm seeing, totally disingenuous. In your mind, you're probably thinking that you would get something worth value. But this is an application right now that they say millions of people have installed, and what people actually get out of it after years is almost nothing.

The numbers don't add up anywhere you look

It says they have 55 million engaged members, but where can we verify that? It says there's 35-plus core team members, but where can we verify that? I don't see anywhere we can actually verify that, because on their website you only have two founders listed. And if you look at the actual block explorer, there's very few transactions even happening, although this is supposedly on the mainnet.

MightyAkimbo says that in the app itself, it says 11 million. So what is the truth here? It says 55-plus million engaged members on one place, but Mighty Akimbo on Twitch, who actually has used the app, says it shows 11 million. So where are these other members? That's five times as much.

This is exactly why I love streaming live on Twitch and hearing from people who have actually used these products — and if you've used one yourself, you can join Jerry Banfield Family and talk it through with me on a weekly call. One person who has genuinely tried the app gives me more real information than any amount of marketing copy.

This smells like a network of bots

If you look at their X account, it looks like there's around 3.3 million followers. This, to me, just smells like bots, like a network of bots pushing all kinds of follows and pushing their posts up like crazy, with influencers being paid. I'll just pull up some random posts. This could be risky to do on a live stream, but look at the actual comments. One post has around 3,000 comments. This looks like bot activity, because there's almost the same number of comments as reactions, and a very small percentage of bookmarks, which they probably didn't pay the bots to do.

Look at one of the top comments with a thousand impressions. That's a clear sign of bot activity and manipulation. They also have KYC you have to do on here. They posted 41,000 impressions with 3,000 comments. This just screams scam and sketchy, and you have to KYC verify on top of it. This looks like there's some people putting a serious effort into ripping everyone off. It looks so obviously bad, and some of the people I've seen shilling this, the other stuff they're shilling is equally as bad.

This has been going for years and we still don't even have a mainnet on it. And they're calling it the future of social cryptocurrency, which is ridiculous.

Here's what the future actually looks like

If you've seen OpenChat on the Internet Computer Protocol, that is the future. It's a fully on-chain application controlled and owned by code, by a DAO, where you've got all kinds of different currencies. You can transact and tip and give away, from ICP to the CHAT token, Bitcoin, Ethereum, USDC. That is the future.

I've actually been in crypto 10 years. I've used a whole bunch of applications, and there's no technology that's even close to as advanced as OpenChat, which is an application on the Internet Computer Protocol. For $5 you can put a gigabyte into smart contract memory and do computation at scale. You've got 15% APR rewards for staking and voting, and 5,000 transactions per second. To me, this absolutely blows away Pi Network to an unbelievable degree.

Look at the team on that. One of the things Dominic Williams, the founder of DFINITY and ICP, said is: if you want to research an altcoin and see how good it is, see if you can find the engineers, the computer scientists, the PhDs that are actually building the network itself. Pi Network, by the way, has struggled to even get a mainnet launched. From what I can see, and from what people are saying, there's very few people, maybe two, actually building it. You have to have a 10-part checklist to get the devs KYC approval, and the mainnet is still not up. This sounds like something a couple of developers are working on, with a few marketing people paying for crazy amounts of bot engagement.

This is obviously not genuine engagement, because every single post has about the same number of comments, retweets, and reactions, all clustered together. That's an extremely bad sign, when they're willing to pay for bots to dump all this engagement to try and trick you. If you want to go deeper on coin tokenomics and red flags like these, I keep all of these breakdowns going in my Crypto Reviews playlist.

They're botting YouTube too

Let me check one of their YouTube channels cold. I haven't even looked at it yet, but let's just see how it looks. This is a YouTube short. This channel has like 1.5 million subscribers, and they're botting their YouTube channel like crazy. The number of views on shorts wouldn't be enough to get you anywhere near that many subscribers. They're botting their YouTube views and subscribers to an insane level.

Some of their videos are nuts. They're botting their videos like crazy just to get them out there, and they've hardly even got any videos out. Do you think this video organically gets four thousand likes on a couple hundred thousand views? Do you think a one-minute, seventeen-second video shot in vertical does that? I've been on YouTube 13 years. These are crappy quality videos, mostly shot in mobile, vertical. Maybe they're paying for ads, but based on their X account, they're either paying for ads or botting, and probably botting, because bots are cheaper than doing paid ads.

What's shocking is the amount they've put into marketing this, and what looks to me like either bots or paid ads. They've dumped a ton of marketing money into this, but on a technical level they seem almost incapable of executing the basic thing of getting a mainnet up. That is shocking, unless you know crypto, and then it makes perfect sense. It looks like there's almost no engineering people actually working on this. It's all marketing, all hype, all speculation, with hardly any actual transactions happening on the network.

Compare that to a real project

When you compare that to something like the Internet Computer, you can see the difference. Internet Computer Protocol did the first on-chain AI demo, and that got 1.5 million impressions on the founder's account. Pi did a KYC update on their account with 700,000 impressions, and you can imagine the comments are just bots, plus people saying things aren't working, "I lost my wallet and there's no recovery option." If that post got 700-some thousand views and it was organic, you would see a ton of comments in there talking about it.

This looks extremely sketchy. It has a real slimy feeling to it, and I'm not sure there's hardly any actual revolutionary and proprietary tech. It seems there's almost no proprietary or revolutionary technology happening here, but there is some kind of clear marketing manipulation. They haven't even been able to get things sorted with the exchanges or get a mainnet launched. This is so bad.

Why I make videos like this

I do videos like this because I'm tired of people getting ripped off on these junk coins, and they don't even allow wallet recovery. The information we're getting on Twitch about this is why I love streaming live: they don't even allow wallet recovery. So many people have been hyping up Pi Network on my live streams, but I don't see anything, in 10 years in crypto and researching thousands of altcoins, that actually looks good about this, especially compared to a real project like Internet Computer Protocol.

Pi Network is a hype nothing-burger. It's awful. Revolutionary and proprietary technology where you can't even recover your wallet? Who's building something like that? It's ridiculous.