Pi Network history: six years before trading
Pi Day 2019
Stanford graduates Nicolas Kokkalis and Chengdiao Fan launched Pi Network on 14 March 2019, Pi Day. The idea was mining without hardware: you open the app and tap a button once every 24 hours to keep earning. The phone does no heavy computation, so this mining has little in common with Bitcoin’s.
An enclosed mainnet and KYC
The mainnet started in December 2021 as an enclosed network behind a firewall, cut off from outside exchanges. Before a balance could move from the app to the mainnet, its owner had to pass KYC, an identity check. The team spent the next three years verifying users and migrating balances.
20 February 2025: the network opens
The open network went live at 8:00 UTC on 20 February 2025, and PI started trading on exchanges for the first time. Liquidity was thin. Within hours the price fell about 65%, according to Cointelegraph, then recovered and set an all-time high of 2.99 dollars on 26 February 2025, by CoinGecko data.
The supply cap
The supply model caps PI at 100 billion tokens, and about 11.3 billion are in circulation, according to CoinGecko. In July 2026 the price fell to its lowest recorded level, 0.0706 dollars.