Pi Network Mainnet has been online for half a year: Is the $10 dream shattered? With a supply of 100 billion and a circulating supply of 74 billion, the community's faith faces the test of selling pressure.

After years of waiting for "mobile mining," Pi Network officially launched its open Mainnet on February 20, 2025, and the $10 coin price target anticipated by 65 million users faced harsh reality. Currently, the price of the PI Token hovers around $0.41, a big dump of over 84% compared to the early days of the Mainnet launch. This article analyzes the dilemma of the hundred billion supply, community sell pressure crisis, and regulatory compliance risks based on the XLM consensus protocol mechanism, tokenomics model, and on-chain data, assessing the possibility of breaking the Pi ecosystem.

The Launch of the Mainnet Disillusionment: The Huge Gap Between Expectation and Reality

(Source: TradingView)

• Highlight moments are fleeting: In the early days of the Mainnet launch, the PI price briefly surged before rapidly crashing. According to data from several market platforms, the price has fallen below the $0.5 mark in the summer of 2025, with a drop of over 84% from its peak.
• Current Market Performance: As of the time of writing, PI is priced at $0.41 (down 85.4% from its historical high of $2.80), with only a few exchanges supporting spot trading or IOU contracts.
• Community sentiment divergence: The Mainnet launch did not produce the expected wealth effect, early participants cashed out massively, creating intense competition with steadfast holders ("Pi believers").

Tokenomics Predicament: 100 Billion Supply Becomes a $10 Chasm

• Total Supply Design: PI has a fixed total supply of 10 billion coins, of which 80% are allocated to community users through "click mining" and promotional rewards.
• Circulation Pressure: By early 2025, the circulation volume will reach 74 billion coins. To achieve the $10 target, it requires a $74 billion market value—surpassing most established cryptocurrencies, equivalent to creating a mainstream CEX-level listed company out of thin air.
• Persistent Inflation Risk: Daily sign-in rewards continuously release billions of Tokens, creating permanent market sell pressure, making it difficult to break the price pressure mechanism.

Technical Mechanism Controversy: The Essence of Non-Traditional Mining

• Consensus Protocol Essence: Based on the Stellar Consensus Protocol (SCP), users' mobile phones do not perform real Mining, but rather achieve low-energy transaction verification by forming "Security Circles".
• Node Control Concerns: The core team still controls the majority of nodes, with key functions such as smart contracts delayed by several years in implementation, leading to community concerns about the level of decentralization.
• Promotion Model Controversy: The multi-level referral reward mechanism is criticized for being similar to a pyramid scheme (MLM), where the incentives for bringing in new users outweigh the contributions to technology.

Compliance and Privacy: A Sword of Damocles

• KYC Data Risks: Mandatory requirement for millions of users to submit government ID + facial scan to complete KYC, data security and privacy protection pose major risks.
• SEC Regulatory Sword: The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission may classify PI as an unregistered security, posing a high potential litigation risk, especially regarding its "pre-mining" allocation model.
• Global Regulatory Pressure: The lack of a clear compliance framework after the Mainnet launch has exacerbated the liquidity crisis, with slow progress in the exchange listing of coins.

Community Double-Edged Sword: The Pros and Cons of 65 Million Users

• Scale Advantage: Over 65 million registered users form a large foundational ecosystem, offline events like "PiFest" promote scenario construction, creating a cold start traffic barrier.
• Source of Selling Pressure: Early users hold coins at nearly zero cost, the motivation to cash out is much higher than the demand for use, resulting in a continuous market sell-off.
• Lack of Value Support: The ecosystem lacks stable consumption scenarios, and user behavior is still primarily focused on "Mining, withdrawing, and selling," leading the token into a death spiral of utility.

Feasibility of a $10 Target: Miracle or Fantasy? Achieving the $10 target requires meeting three major conditions:

1. Demand Side Explosion: Daily trading volume needs to increase by a hundred times to attract over ten billion dollars of external funds into the market.
2. Substantial breakthrough in the ecosystem: Build essential scenarios such as high-frequency payments, DeFi, or social applications to reverse the perception of "useless tokens".
3. Perfect Risk Avoidance: Avoid global regulatory crackdowns, alleviate community sell pressure, and prevent the centralization control of the technical team.

The current PI price trend and on-chain data indicate that the market has severely insufficient confidence in the realization of the above conditions.

Conclusion: The Life-and-Death Transformation from Traffic Miracle to Value Creation The core contradiction of the Pi Network lies in the irreconcilable conflict between the massive user base accumulated through viral growth and its weak value carrying capacity. The project is facing a triple test of life and death:

Core Challenge:

1. Tokenomics Reconstruction: Can we hedge against hundreds of billions in inflation through mechanisms such as burning and utility binding?
2. Regulatory Compliance Breakthrough: Can we obtain key licenses under the regulatory siege of the US and Europe?
3. Ecological Scenario Breakthrough: Can we incubate millions of daily active applications within 12 months?

Potential Pathways:

• Draw on the development model of the TON ecosystem and leverage community scale to incubate Web3 super applications.
• Collaborate with cross-border payment providers to embed PI into emerging market remittance scenarios
• Launch a large-scale token burn plan and transition to a deflationary model

If the transition from "traffic products" to "value networks" cannot be completed by 2025, Pi may struggle to escape the fate of most social mining projects hitting zero. The $10 dream ultimately requires real value support that goes beyond marketing.