Pi Network Has 60 Million Users But the Token Keeps Dropping and Here Is the Full Picture

PI token trades around $0.17 as of early April 2026, down more than 90% from its brief $3 peak after the Open Mainnet launch in February 2025. The network behind it claims over 60 million registered users, making it one of the largest crypto communities on paper. And yet the token has done nothing but bleed for over a year while 231 million more tokens are scheduled to enter circulation this month alone.

The gap between Pi Network's community size and its token performance is one of the widest in crypto. That gap either represents an opportunity or a warning, depending entirely on which version of Pi Network you believe in, and both sides have real arguments worth understanding.

What Pi Network Actually Is and How It Got 60 Million Users

Pi Network was founded in 2019 by Stanford PhDs Nicolas Kokkalis and Chengdiao Fan with a simple pitch. Download the app, tap a button once every 24 hours, and earn PI tokens through "mobile mining." No hardware required, no electricity costs, no technical knowledge needed. The barrier to entry was effectively zero, and the referral system rewarded users for inviting friends, which is how the network grew from zero to 60 million registered users in roughly five years.

The Open Mainnet launched on February 20, 2025, and PI briefly touched $3.00 on exchange listings before sellers overwhelmed buyers. The price collapsed quickly and has continued sliding, trading around $0.17 with a market cap near $1.7 billion. Out of those 60 million registered users, roughly 19 million have completed KYC verification and about 16 million have actually migrated their tokens to mainnet. That means roughly 73% of the claimed user base has either not verified their identity or not bothered to claim their tokens on-chain.

Source: X

The mining mechanism itself is worth understanding because it explains the token economics. Users do not actually mine in any traditional sense. Tapping the button signals activity and earns rewards from a pre-allocated pool of 65 billion PI tokens designated for community distribution. The total supply cap is 100 billion PI, with 20 billion reserved for the Core Team and the remaining 15 billion split between ecosystem building and liquidity pools.

The Tokenomics Problem That Keeps Getting Worse

This is where the math starts working against PI holders. Out of approximately 9.2 billion tokens that have migrated to mainnet, about 5.4 billion remain locked, representing roughly 58.6% of migrated supply. But the total max supply is 100 billion, which means only about 9% of all PI that will ever exist is currently in any form of circulation. The vesting schedule releases hundreds of millions of new tokens every month.

April 2026 alone brings 231 million tokens into circulation, worth roughly $40 million at current prices. That is about 2% of the entire market cap hitting the market in a single month. And this pattern repeats monthly for years.

For comparison, Bitcoin's annual inflation rate is under 1%. Ethereum's is near zero after the merge. PI's effective inflation from token releases alone dwarfs both by orders of magnitude. Every month, more supply hits a market that has shown no ability to absorb the selling pressure.

The Bull Case for Pi Network

The bull case rests on three pillars, and to be fair, none of them are trivial.

Community scale is real, and sixty million users is not nothing. Even if only 19 million have completed KYC, that is still a larger verified user base than most Layer-1 blockchains can claim. If even a fraction of those users become active participants in a Pi-based economy, the network effects could be significant. The Pi Day 2026 update introduced smart contracts via the v23.0 upgrade, Rust-based and running on WebAssembly, along with a token launchpad and GenAI App Studio. Over 215 applications were submitted through the 2025 hackathon, and the native Depth Exchange is operational.

The cross-chain bridge announcement signals awareness that Pi cannot exist in isolation. Connecting to other blockchain ecosystems would let PI flow into DeFi protocols and gain utility beyond the Pi ecosystem itself. And the second migration wave that started in March 2026 is releasing referral bonuses and bringing more users onto mainnet, which could expand the active user count.

Mobile-first onboarding remains Pi's genuine innovation. No other project has made crypto accessible to this many non-technical users. If the ecosystem develops real utility for payments, marketplaces, and financial services in emerging markets where traditional banking is limited, the distribution advantage becomes a real competitive moat.

The Bear Case and Why Critics Call It a Scam

The bear case is not subtle, and some of the criticism goes beyond normal skepticism.

Centralization is the core issue. Despite marketing itself as a decentralized network, Pi Network reportedly operates on just three validator nodes controlled by the Core Team. That is not decentralization by any meaningful definition. The team controls token distribution, migration timing, and network upgrades with no on-chain governance mechanism giving users actual power over protocol decisions.

Justin Bons, founder of CyberCapital, has publicly labeled Pi Network a scam, citing centralized control and a referral structure that resembles a pyramid scheme. The referral reward system, where users earn more PI by inviting others who also tap the mining button daily, does share structural similarities with multi-level marketing. The value proposition for early users depends heavily on later users joining and creating demand for the token.

The $10 million federal class-action lawsuit filed by Harro Moen against SocialChain Inc. in October 2025 alleges unauthorized transfers of PI tokens from user wallets and secret sales of approximately 2 billion PI tokens by insiders. The case is pending in the Northern District of California. While analysts have questioned some of the lawsuit's claims, particularly a $307 price figure based on pre-mainnet IOU values rather than market price, the allegations about centralized token control and unauthorized transfers are more serious.

Scam activity within the ecosystem has also been a recurring problem. The Pi Team temporarily suspended the payment request feature after bad actors exploited it to drain 4.4 million PI tokens from user wallets. Fake contract addresses mimicking legitimate Pi assets have appeared across Web3 wallets targeting the community.

And then there is the fundamental question. What does PI actually do that existing blockchains do not already do better? The smart contract functionality launched in 2026 runs on WebAssembly, but so do contracts on dozens of other chains with deeper developer ecosystems and actual DeFi liquidity. The marketplace and payment dApps in the Pi ecosystem are mostly used by Pi community members paying each other in PI, which creates a circular economy rather than genuine external demand.

How PI Compares to Other "Mobile Mining" Projects

Pi Network is not the only project that promised easy crypto through phone-based mining. The track record of similar projects is not encouraging.

Bee Network launched with a nearly identical tap-to-mine model and saw its token lose over 95% of value after listing. Electroneum (ETN) pitched mobile mining in 2017, raised $40 million in an ICO, and trades today at a fraction of a cent with minimal adoption. Ice Network, another Pi-style clone, has not yet launched a tradeable token despite millions of claimed users.

The pattern across mobile mining projects follows a consistent arc. Massive user acquisition driven by zero-cost participation, hype around a future token launch, a brief price spike on listing day, and then a long decline as the lack of real-world utility meets the reality of constant token inflation. Pi has followed this pattern precisely so far, with the v23.0 smart contract upgrade representing the project's attempt to break the cycle by adding genuine programmability to the chain.

The question is if that upgrade changes the trajectory or simply delays it, and the answer depends on if developers build applications that attract users from outside the existing Pi community. So far, that external adoption has not materialized.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Pi Network a scam or a legitimate project?

Pi Network is a real project with a functioning mainnet, exchange listings on platforms like OKX, and verifiable on-chain activity. But the centralized control structure, referral-based growth model, and pending federal lawsuit raise legitimate concerns that go beyond normal project risk. The honest answer is that it sits in a gray area between an ambitious mobile-first experiment and a project with serious structural red flags.

Why does PI token price keep falling?

The primary driver is supply inflation, with hundreds of millions of new PI tokens vesting and entering circulation every month from the migration and release schedule, and there is not enough buying demand to absorb the constant selling pressure. With only 9% of the 100 billion max supply currently circulating, the dilution problem gets worse over time unless demand grows dramatically faster than supply releases.

Can Pi Network reach $1 or higher?

At $1 per token, PI's fully diluted valuation would be $100 billion, roughly equal to Ethereum's current market cap. That would require Pi Network to generate utility and adoption comparable to the second-largest blockchain ecosystem in crypto. At the current circulating supply, $1 would put the market cap around $3.8 billion, which is more realistic but would still require a reversal of the current downtrend and a meaningful catalyst for buying demand.

Bottom Line

Pi Network's 60 million users represent a distribution achievement that no other crypto project has replicated, and that community is worth watching regardless of where you fall on the bull-bear spectrum. But distribution without utility is just a mailing list, and the token economics are working against holders at every token release event. The 231 million tokens hitting circulation in April 2026 alone represent relentless sell pressure that the current $21 million in daily volume cannot easily absorb.

The v23.0 smart contract upgrade and cross-chain bridge announcement are the right moves if the goal is building real utility, but they arrive more than a year after mainnet launch and after a 90%+ price decline that has shaken confidence. The federal lawsuit adds uncertainty that will not resolve quickly. Watch if the Pi ecosystem generates meaningful transaction volume from users outside its existing community. That external adoption metric, not the user count, is the number that will determine if PI stabilizes or continues its decline.

This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute financial or investment advice. Cryptocurrency trading involves substantial risk. Always conduct your own research before making trading decisions.