Original author: Encrypted Wei Tuo, Encrypted KOL

Editor’s note: Today, Pi Network officially issued a document stating that its main network will be officially launched at 16:00 on February 20. Not only that, mainstream exchanges such as OKX and Bitget have also announced that they will launch PI spot trading at that time. What is Pi Network? Why is it jokingly called the “strongest push”? This article was first published on December 27, 2022 and provides a comprehensive introduction to the principles, team background, and reasons for success of Pi Network. Since it has been released for more than two years, some data may differ. BlockBeats reprinted the full text as follows:

In the morning, I saw the information that @PiCoreTeam was attracted by Huobi and might be listed in coins. I plan to write in detail about this project that our AC internal special analysis has been conducted for more than a year. This article will introduce the philosophical question of what is Pi and why it is Pi from multiple perspectives.

Stream saving: This is the most Underrated 2C application project of Crypto and deserves careful study by all teams.

1. What is Pi?

Pi Network was born on 2019.3.14. In essence, it is an APP that claims to be based on Stellar and can “mine on mobile phones.” Pi’s purpose is to build a highly accessible and low-cost decentralized digital currency network (which can be regarded as a light node concept like MINA).

The mining method is very simple: users click the button every 24 hours, and every 24 hours is a mining cycle, and they need to click again when they expire. The whole process is completely free.

2. Pi’s communication mechanism

Pi has three communication-related roles:

– Pioneer is the default identity

– Contributors need to unlock it through mining for 3 days, and establish a “safety circle” by adding existing Pi users or mobile contact users. After establishment, you can gain additional mining power. Each person will increase 0.02, and the maximum reward will be 0.1 (5 people).

– Ambassador: Invite mobile phone contacts or new user invitation codes to become ambassadors after successful registration

3. Pi coin

The main concept of Pi Coin is to give everyone the opportunity to obtain cryptocurrency at an equal and low threshold (if you have the courage to do so). Therefore, Pi is dug out for free and has no price anchor. Currently, it is in the testing network stage, and eventually Pi will go to the “main network”, which is to build a self-built public chain. So the current Pi is actually a centralized integral. Last year, Pi began requiring users around the world to conduct KYC and open a test online wallet, which can be used to transfer money after opening it.

4. Pi is not a simple Ponzi:

Pi’s positioning is not to enter gold Ponzi, but to earn online traffic for free routes. But this is different from the “interesting headlines” that earn traffic differences. Pi allows users to earn Pi without pricing (if there is no deposit, there will be no pricing, and if there is no transaction, there will be no liquidity). After the advertising mechanism is added later, all advertising revenue is actually earned by yourself. As long as Pi coins are not in circulation, the project itself is actually profitable.

5. As a layman, let me make an estimate

Pi claims to have 35 million users. If you actually get a 50% discount of 1,700,000 active users, and the users are basically in Asia, Africa and Latin America, and press CPM $0.3 for two messages a day (based on the perception that there are not many ads), then the receivable per day should be around $10200. For a Pi team with only 2-10 people, that’s enough. Letting a large number of users watch advertisements every day without paying the cost is a very test of the project’s CPU capabilities. How does Pi do it?

6. Pi and electronic religion

Pi is not so much a Ponzi or mobile application as Pi is closer to an electronic religion. You can’t use conventional product logic to explain such a project that is widely participatory, spontaneously disseminated, and does not give a proportion.

According to sociologist Lorne Dawson’s definition, a religion consists of four aspects: Belief doctrine, ritual rites, experience, and community community.

Pi’s teachings: Crypto, everyone can participate in and everyone can own it. Not Crypto, but very reasonable in the context of its audience. Pi’s largest audience comes from Southeast Asia, South Asia, Nigeria, and marginalized people in Europe and the United States. This group is essentially the radiation range of antheism or fetishism. The essence of this religion is methodology rather than the emphasis on “God is the beginning of all things” as monotheism does. As long as you achieve enlightenment, you will become an immortal; as long as you mine, you will become rich

For people with low living standards (in a material or spiritual sense), the methodological religion similar to communism, the ideal of wealth per person + the belief that man conquers heaven and becomes immortal has always worked.

Before 2019, these regions had already completed the opening of “BTC” under funds such as 3M and the Crypto speculative bull market. Talking about a new coin that would “create the future” and be obtained for free is no longer a metaphysical fantasy. It is closer to the immortal’s soaring method of alchemy.

Pi’s teaching ceremony:A ritual is a ritual that is repeated to strengthen faith, such as daily prayer and meditation, or baptism that symbolizes a new stage in life. For Pi, activating computing power on time every 24 hours is a daily prayer. Due to the existence of a countdown to the mining cycle and the very detailed output dashboard, many people set an alarm every day to remind themselves to activate in order not to waste output. Constant psychological suggestions strengthen beliefs day after day.

“Identity” is equivalent to a label. When a person activates a contributor and completes a safety circle, it is equivalent to turning from a small white to a veteran in Pi’s community. Every minute in Pi Chat, people answer questions for newcomers and invite them to add your own safety circle, just like a priest performing a baptism. The ceremony brought more “sense of mission” and made more people lose themselves in the sound of “thx bro”, forming objective positive psychological feedback.

Pi’s religious experience:We generally refer to religious experience as metaphysics, subjective experiences that cannot be falsified but make your beliefs unquestionable, such as water reversal, luck seeking, etc. Personally, I think Pi is doing very smart here. In the bear market winter of 2019, almost all projects were proving that they could “physically implement” and anchor the growth value of XX’s physical assets. Pi’s story is the attention market, similar to BAT. But Pi is much smarter than BAT.

BAT has designed a complete set of semi-centralized CAC arbitrage products: browser, token, adblocker. Full of technical legitimacy, it is indeed a successful team. However, Pi used only a fraction of the development cost (estimated in single digits Dev) to gain a user base that was as good as BAT. Because they are very clear that the “miracle” that the target users want to prove is not the product, but whether they can witness more applications of Picoin and see that “the world is playing.”

Pi’s products are close to brainless and have basically no use. The team told the community without fear: Pi has no monetary value. It will not be inexplicably valuable just because it is called “coin.” When the community is built bigger and has more users, Pi will be valuable. Ironically, there is nothing wrong with what they say. Through the Brainstorm section, Pi solicited electronics and products to use Pi from users who had already poached many Pi’s, and even launched DAO and hackathons. You know that was 2020.

As a result, proposals such as Pi-based games, e-commerce, and spinach platforms emerged. These proposals inspired many local business owners who hold many Pi’s and cannot monetize them to start bartering in the Pi community. I have never seen a currency exchange for a car. I really witnessed it with my own eyes in Indonesia. By mobilizing the community, Pi inadvertently formed a self-fulfilling prophecy, which consolidated the belief that “Pi has been adopted by many people and is on the right path to making history.”

Coupled with the team’s status as a Stanford postdoctoral fellow, the entire narrative becomes very “reasonable.” Last week, I launched a survey in the FB, Telegram, and Reddit communities of various Pi. When more than 70 respondents were asked “Name three reasons why you believe in the value of Pi and continue to use it.” More than 75% of the respondents responded with “widespread use around the world.” Many people cited examples of the development history of BTC to describe the current progress of Pi.

Pi Community: Pi has a strong belief in community and still maintains CX despite having no actual financial benefits for a long time. How does he do this?

Let’s first go back to Pi’s product design. The Pi product budget is extremely limited, and no native product is still packaged in H5. Its budget is focused on two things: dashboards and invitations. Pi has a very clear computing power output dashboard, and specific data gives people strong real-time feedback. It’s clear at a glance how much we promote

Secondly, its invitation part is carefully designed, distinguishing between acquaintances ‘social circles and strangers’ online social interactions (security circles and ambassadors). Adding members to directly read the address book, the word “security” psychologically implies strong links and trust, not just the classic solar system. This made it easy for Pi to create a small group community similar to a church in the early days, making it easier to supervise the implementation of the much-needed teachings in the early days. More than 60% of the users interviewed were recommended by friends.

Thirdly, an emerging religion cannot be born without charming leaders and missionaries. Compared with @Junstinsuntron or @RichardHeartWin, the two PhDs are obviously difficult to achieve success, but they frequently show up, and their sincerity + academic background still add a lot of points. You can actually understand from Angelist and Linkedin that Pi actually recruits people, and it is precisely CM and ambassadors who recruit them. https://angel.co/company/pi-network/jobs

This suggests that Pi may have always been recruiting direct “missionaries”. Through continuous output of content, CM/Ambassador promotes atmosphere and localization, catalysing spontaneous communities in each place based on the situation of each region. You can even boldly guess that Pi uses CM to call for off-site Pi prices, guide KYC public opinion, and so on. In my questionnaire, some users also reported that they learned about Pi through local radio stations in Nigeria. It is not surprising that such an extreme sinking method has occurred.

Pi’s next step?

In essence, the carrier of Pi is still an APP, and any APP has its own life cycle, and Pi is no exception. The vast majority of interviewees joined between 19 and 20. During this period, there was constant competition from imitation disks such as @Beenetworkintl, and the main network problem could not be resolved. Most importantly, Pi’s “teachings” may be difficult to apply to the next cycle after experiencing a bull market. The rapid drop in popularity of keywords is proof.

If I were @PiCoreTeam, the best choice would be to let Pi finally go online and complete the coin. If advertising fee revenue will shrink significantly as user data declines, then before that, the way to maximize benefits is to use coins to give the community a boost and complete cash out. Moreover, in terms of community strength alone,#shib may not be a competitor. For exchanges, traffic attention is full. Therefore, it is entirely possible to list Huobi.

Pi may also be doing this. There is a lot of evidence such as Lockup Reward, which requires users to promise to lock up their positions after launching the main website; another example is the launch of the test net wallet to allow money transfers; and the very unusual repeated reports of Pi by media such as @BSCNews. If there is no plan to deposit coins, these will be useless. To maintain stability, there are much better ways than this, such as direct consumption of “ecological projects”. The disk owners in front of the screen must have more experience than me.

But one thing is that the current controller of Pi (note that I said controller, not the core team) obviously has not yet decided whether to move towards a full public chain or the BAT path. So with both Browser and Testnet, of course, the greater possibility is that the technical strength is poor. Since Pi is closed source, we have no way of knowing how many Pi IOUs have been dug up. If we calculate it based on 29 million users, the daily output should be 284 mils.

So how does Pi control the disk? The answer lies in KYC.

Pi’s KYC is similar to an invitation system, so Pi has a very large discretion to decide how many people to invite and how many people to pass. Pi users are mostly in third world countries, which is inherently difficult to carry out KYC. Secondly, it is through the lockup just mentioned. In the end, Pi may not be IEO (U.S. User Compliance), but will compete with CEX through DEX. A large number of users may be blocked by the threshold. These can effectively control circulation.

In the end, is Pi a product with no “value”?

It depends on how you define value. Judging from its public chain narrative, there is no, because it has a high probability that it cannot create a public chain that can compete with the mainstream. But 35 million people have experienced crypto without risk and even established beliefs, and many of them have already embarked on their Web3 journey, Pi’s contribution is far greater than many so-called OGs. In this way, Teacher @LeePima is really a pioneer of the times.

Enlightenment for Web3 project parties:

Pi’s success says three things:

1. Put your feet in the dirt and thoroughly understand your users, CX is worth lifelong learning for product managers
2. Don’t be complacent about the “Crypto Native” features you created. Users may not understand and use them.
3. Web3 is more about human nature than Web 2. Make good use of human nature and understand how to create a religion.

In fact, one point was missed yesterday: Which is the bigger moat, technology or consensus? In addition to the pioneering frontiers of the industry, such as ZK and other deptech, other products, including public chains, can fork you out with the money available without considering innovation. But consensus does not work, and religious beliefs cannot be doubted. You would bargain with technology outsourcing, but medieval leeks would bargain with the church for indulgences. Can you give me a discount?

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