$PI nothing happen today ._.

$PI Sharpening the scissors and honing the kitchen knife, just sharpening here. The more I sharpen, the smoother it cuts the chives.

While recently revisiting the history before Pi’s launch, I suddenly realized that this project has taken a rather unusual path—from the seed of the idea to reaching the market. First, let’s talk about the two founders. Chengdiao Fan is a Ph.D. in Behavioral Science from Stanford, and his research focuses on human-computer interaction and social computing—simply put, how to use technology to influence human behavior. The other is Nicolas Kokkalis, a Ph.D. in Computer Science, who also teaches blockchain at Stanford. What’s interesting is that among Dr. Fan’s classmates at Stanford is an exceptionally impressive figure—Priscilla Chan, Mark Zuckerberg’s wife. This combination of backgrounds alone hints at something—this isn’t some small, ambitious project. The starting point of the story is a conversation in 2018. The two Ph.D. students discussed the energy consumption issues of Bitcoin mining in the lab, and then Fan asked, “What if everyone could participate using only their phones?” And just like that, the whole ecosystem before Pi’s launch began to take shape. On March 14, 2019 (Pi Day, and the choice of this timing was quite deliberate), the iOS version of the app went live. The concept of “mining just by tapping every day” spread at an astonishing speed—within 90 days, Spanish tutorial videos surpassed one million views, and an Argentine housewife formed the “Pi Mom Alliance.” By the end of 2020, it had already expanded to more than 170 countries, and the number of users had exceeded 3.5 million. The growth curve really looks like nuclear fission. But the problems that came with it were also obvious. After the testnet went live, it was found that some nodes could forge proof-of-computation, so the team rolled out a “Security Circle” mechanism—requiring each user to link 3–5 real contacts. Although this design solved the security issue, it also made the entire structure more complex; some analysts at the time said it was ten times more complicated than pyramid schemes. The controversies before Pi’s launch started from here. The mainnet preparation period dragged on for a long time. It launched in December 2021, but it remained closed; transfers were limited to tested transfers between verified members only. By the end of 2022, the user base had reached 33 million, but the issue with mainnet transfers still had not been fully resolved. In 2023, the Korean Financial Services Commission listed it in a high-risk warning category, and regulatory problems also appeared in places such as Vietnam and Indonesia. The biggest problem before Pi’s launch was trust. A community made up of hundreds of millions of users worldwide—most people had never even seen the token’s actual price. The strength of that belief really is rare, but it also means that once it launches and the price fluctuates, how big the psychological gap will be. The latest update is that a major exchange has indeed listed PI. The current price is around $0.17, and the circulating supply has reached 10.1 billion coins, with a circulation rate of about 10%. The stories from the years before Pi’s launch—community-driven activities on their own, and stories that big markets accepted PI payment—now all have a new dimension of explanation. Some people say this is a victory for the community, with years of hard work finally reaching the summit. Others worry: with such strong user trust, can it truly withstand the market’s real volatility? I’m genuinely curious what will happen next.