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 bringing people into the community who have actually used these products. 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 Money 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. If you've had your own experience, good or bad, with a coin like this, come tell me about it inside the community, because real, firsthand information helps me do far better reviews than any whitepaper or marketing page ever could.