The cryptocurrency market sees the emergence of approximately 15 new projects every day, but historical data shows that over 83% of these projects disappear within 36 months. As of the second quarter of 2025, the market capitalization of Bitcoin remained at 1.4 trillion US dollars, accounting for 42.7% of the entire crypto market. However, despite claiming to have 35 million active users, pi coin has not yet been listed on any major exchange, and its actual circulation is zero. CoinMarketCap monitoring shows that over the past 90 days, the quote of pi coin on unofficial over-the-counter trading platforms has fluctuated by as much as 187%, with the lowest point reaching $0.08 and the highest $0.86. However, 95% of the transactions lack compliance custody protection. This liquidity predicament stands in sharp contrast to the early stage of Bitcoin in 2009 – when Bitcoin was listed on the Mt. Gox exchange just 18 months after its launch, with an average daily trading volume exceeding 300,000 US dollars.
The differences in technical architecture constitute the core demarcation. The Proof of Work (PoW) mechanism of Bitcoin processes 7 transactions per second, while the measured speed of the Stellar Consensus Protocol (SCP) testnet adopted by pi coin is 20 transactions per second, which is still far lower than the peak processing capacity of 24,000 transactions of the Visa network. In terms of energy efficiency indicators, data from the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance shows that a single transaction of Bitcoin consumes as much as 1,210 kWh of energy, while the pi coin mobile mining model keeps the energy consumption at 0.02kWh per day. However, when 3,000 developers participated in the testnet verification, the median node synchronization delay reached 7.2 seconds, far exceeding Solana’s standard of 0.4 seconds. The completion rate of its KYC (Real-Name Authentication) process is only 13%, resulting in a huge uncertainty regarding the actual base of convertible users.
The design of economic models has sparked controversy. pi coin’s plan to pre-mine a total of 80 billion coins is of an order of magnitude different from Bitcoin’s scarcity model of 21 million coins. The project party retains a 21% reserve pool, equivalent to control of 16.8 billion tokens. According to the economic model in the white paper, the inflation rate in the first year after the mainnet goes online is set at 28.5%, which is much higher than the current inflation rate of 1.8% for Bitcoin. Referring to the Ethereum crowdfunding case in 2015, the cost of each ETH was $0.31 at that time, and the price peak reached $1,432 three years later. However, such a rate of return was based on the fact that the smart contract ecosystem had already supported a TVL (Total Value Locked) of $46 billion. Currently, the number of verifiable Dapps in the pi coin ecosystem is less than 50, and the total liquidity of DeFi protocols is only 2.7 million US dollars.
Regulatory compliance risks have become the biggest obstacle. In the final judgment of the Ripple lawsuit in 2024, the US SEC established a standard: any unregistered security token will face a fine of 300% of the transaction amount for each transaction. At present, the financial regulatory authorities of nine countries, including the Philippines and Vietnam, have placed pi coin on the warning list. According to Chainalysis’ blockchain forensics report, fraud cases involving pi coin’s over-the-counter trading have increased by 740% in the past 18 months, causing cumulative losses to users exceeding 83 million US dollars. Under the framework of the EU Crypto Assets Market Regulation (MiCA), such unregistered projects will face penalties of up to 10% of their annual revenue or 5 million euros.
The core indicator that truly determines value is the market adoption rate. Data on the Glassnode chain shows that the number of active Bitcoin addresses has exceeded one million, while the peak number of active addresses on the pi coin testnet was only 124,000. In terms of the implementation of payment scenarios, BitPay statistics show that 82,346 merchants worldwide accepted Bitcoin payments in 2024, but no mainstream commercial system has yet integrated pi coin. In terms of project advancement efficiency, the average annual code submission volume of Bitcoin core developers reaches 19,400 lines, while the update frequency of pi coin’s GitHub repository has decreased by 67% in the past six months. Historical experience shows that in 2017, a similar OneCoin project was eventually confirmed as a Ponzi scheme, resulting in a loss of 40 billion US dollars for investors. Current market data indicates that the proportion of pi coin allocated by investors should be controlled within 0.5% of total assets. After all, true technological innovation needs to verify its value through actual utility rather than the user scale bubble formed by social chain reactions.