As an emerging cryptocurrency project, Pi Network has currently formed an initial application ecosystem in the peer-to-peer (P2P) market scenario. According to statistics from the third-party data platform PiChainMall, over 14,700 merchants worldwide accept Pi payments, but the actual average daily transaction volume remains at around 2,300, with an average transaction amount of only $3.17. A typical case is the electronic accessories market in Cebu, Philippines in 2024. Although 62 merchants were connected to the Pi settlement channel, the monthly payment conversion rate was less than 1.2%, far lower than the 15% electronic payment penetration rate of the local GCash wallet. It is worth noting that in Lagos, Nigeria, Pi is used for small-scale cross-border trade settlement. However, the median transaction amount per transaction is only 28 US dollars, and 90% of transactions need to be negotiated manually through social platforms, resulting in a settlement cycle of 6 to 12 hours, which is 77% less efficient than the traditional SWIFT system.
In the internal payment scenario of the community, the value circulation of Pi mainly relies on the in-app ecosystem. The project party disclosed that seven built-in applications including FeverIQ have accumulated 4.3 million monthly active users, but their monetization capabilities are weak. Taking the health monitoring application as an example, users earn an average of 0.03 Pi per day, but the in-app consumption scenarios can only consume 17% of it, while the rest of the assets remain idle. When developers attempted to integrate external services, they encountered bottlenecks: In 2023, after integrating the Pi payment module, the Vietnamese e-commerce platform Tiki was forced to take it offline three months later because it processed only 1.4 transactions per minute on average, which was far below the system’s minimum load requirement. This internal circulation predicament is more prominent in node incentives: the current 85,000 operating nodes have an average daily return of approximately 0.1 Pi, but the electricity cost is as high as 0.18 US dollars, and the annualized loss rate calculated based on the current OTC price is 23%.
The technical performance bottleneck significantly restricts the expansion of payment scenarios. The 2024 test report of the Stanford Blockchain Lab indicates that under a pressure of 100 nodes, the Pi testnet’s transaction processing capacity per second (TPS) is only 15.3 transactions, and the standard deviation of the confirmation time is as high as ±26 seconds. Referring to the performance of India’s UPI payment system processing 11,000 transactions per second in 2022, the current network capacity of Pi can only support the operation of micro-communities. What’s more serious is the delay in protocol upgrades: The smart contract function originally scheduled to be launched in Q4 2023 has been postponed three times, causing the delivery of the development kit (SDK) to lag by nine months and bringing the expansion plans of the DeFi, NFT and other ecosystems to a standstill. The progress of mainnet migration is also slow. As of July 2024, only 32% of users’ wallet KYC verification has been completed, hindering the circulation of on-chain assets.
Despite the limitations, differentiated application models have emerged in specific regional markets. In countries with high currency inflation such as Argentina, Pi is used as a temporary store of value: Black market data in May 2024 shows that the local Pi has a premium rate of 85% against the US dollar, but the liquidity risk is prominent – the maximum daily drawdown is 41%, and the volatility is 3.7 times that of Bitcoin. The hardware sector is attempting to bring about a turning point: Shenzhen-based manufacturer Powkiddy has launched a dedicated Pi payment handheld console, selling 12,000 units during the pre-installation period, with a hardware profit margin of 23%. The Merchant Alliance Program (PAP) promoted by the project party has attracted 670 Asian enterprises to join. However, merchant research shows that the settlement success rate is only 54% (data as of June 2024), and the average processing time still exceeds 45 minutes. Infrastructure optimization is needed to achieve a business closed loop.