Most Underrated Project on Crypto

Bitcoin got created to address the unfair, unjust, and unsustainable financial structures prevailing in our times. It seeks to break the need for trusted intermediaries that may not always act in the best interest of their customers. It tries to create an alternative to the centralized financial systems that had often been weaponized by wealthier nations to subjugate other countries at their will. It was to be a more inclusive monetary mechanism to give everyone more access to financial freedom regardless of their status.

No doubt Bitcoin has a noble cause but far from perfect. For one thing, it has been a victim of its own success. Bitcoin has become so valuable and scarce that only individuals with devices with the highest computational power, such as expensive ASIC machines, can do mining. In addition, those who can afford these machines should also have the technical know-how to set up and configure mining devices to maximize their usage to achieve the fastest ROI.

As a result, it made it very difficult for the average person to participate in the production and acquisition of Bitcoin. This situation caused the centralization of production power and wealth to rise in the Bitcoin network. Bitcoin continues to be the standard-bearer of making digital currencies. A new norm by increasing freedom, flexibility, and privacy. The mentioned weaknesses serve as barriers to meaningful mainstream adoption.

This situation opens opportunities for other cryptocurrencies to exist, bringing with them more advances in distributed ledger technology. One of which is Pi, which we believe is one of the most underrated crypto-related projects in the industry. The Whitepaper of Pi was released on March 14, 2019, marking the existence of Pi. The main objective of Pi is similar to bitcoin but better. The Pi team wants to give everyone an equal opportunity to obtain cryptocurrency by providing a simple and easy way of mining.

What is the Pi Network?

The Pi Network was created and conceptualized by two Stanford doctorate graduates, Dr. Nicolas Kokkalis and Dr. Chengdiao Fan, Head of Technology and Head of Product, respectively. Dr. Kokkalis is an instructor in the first decentralized application class at Stanford. He is especially interested in combining distributed systems and human-computer interaction to bring cryptocurrencies to the masses. Dr. Fan has a Ph.D. in computational anthropology and looks into harnessing social computing to unlock global human potential.

The Pi Network has a similar consensus mechanism to the Stellar Network called the Stellar Consensus Protocol (SCP). It is an instantiation of the Federated Byzantine Agreement (FBA) to secure the network, ensuring that the records on the distributed ledger are accurate and trustworthy. The Pi Network does not consist of most companies and institutions as nodes. However, it allows anyone with a mobile phone, laptop, and computer to participate in acting as a node.

Instead of using expensive and complicated ASIC miners, Pi developers created a remarkably simple way of mining. The user will only need to click a button in the Pi mining app every mining cycle. Each mining cycle lasts for 24 hours, and this process is free. There are also three roles mining participants can play as Pi miners with their own mining computing power. They are the Pioneers, Contributors, and Ambassadors.

Mining Roles in the Pi Network

Pioneers are Pi mobile app users who click the in-app button to confirm that they are human, not a bot. Every time users sign in to the app, they validate their presence in the Pi Network. Contributors are miners that have been mining for 3 days or more. They establish a “safety circle” by adding existing Pi users (Pioneers) or mobile phone contact users. Each additional contact adds 0.02 mining computing power for a maximum of 0.1 or 5 pioneers. Ambassadors are those who introduce new users to the Pi Network.

Pi Coins

The main objective of the Pi Network is to give everyone equal access to cryptocurrencies without the associated risk of investing in this burgeoning asset class. The Pi team does this by allowing Pi Coins (the digital currency of the network) to get mined freely. There was also no suggested price value for Pi Coins from Pi’s development team. Allowing the “invisible hand” of the free market, in this case, Pi holders and users, to determine the value of its coin.

The value of Pi coins does not rely on money invested by new participants coming into Pi’s ecosystem. Instead, its value relies mainly on the revenue generated in the consumption of advertisements on Pi’s platform. There are around 35 million users of the Pi Network coming from Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Assuming that there are only 50% active users in the Pi network and the cost per mille (the amount an advertiser pays a website per one thousand visitors who see the advertisement) CPM is 0.3 USD using the platform twice daily, the daily revenue would be around $10,200.

How Does Pi Maintain a High Number of Active Users?

Key to the success of Pi Network is maintaining a high number of users using its platform. The Pi team was able to build an ecosystem where a large number of users watch advertisements every day at no cost. Using conventional business logic cannot explain this phenomenon. It is nearly impossible to explain how such a project builds a platform with such extensive participation, almost instant dissemination, and at virtually no expense. It is relatively closer to an “Electronic Religion”.

According to Dr. Lorne L. Dawson, a renowned Canadian religion sociologist, religion consists of four aspects:

Belief Doctrine
Ritual
Spiritual Experience
Unique Community
Pi Network’s Belief Doctrine

There is a strong belief within the Pi community that in Crypto, everyone can participate, own, and succeed. The Pi Network is analogous to the religious belief that so long as you believe in God and follow his commandments, you will enjoy the rewards of heaven. For the Pi community, as long as you mine Pi, you can get rich!

For the marginalized population, the hope of everyone being rich and the prospect of winning over heaven or gaining enlightenment and immortality have always worked. Unsurprisingly, the largest audience of Pi comes from Southeast Asia, South Asia, Nigeria, and marginalized groups in Europe and the Americas. The extreme success of Bitcoin solidified their belief that digital currencies are the future of wealth creation and can obtain it for free, at least in the initial years. Bitcoin is not a metaphysical fantasy anymore but a part of history that may repeat.

Pi Network’s Ritual

The daily routine of activating computing power on time every 24 hours is Pi Network’s ritual. Like in religion, it is a daily activity done repeatedly to strengthen the faith and serve as a constant reminder of one’s belief doctrine. Pi Network’s dashboard shows detailed information on the mining cycle countdown, serving as a reminder to its users. Community members set daily alarms to remind themselves to activate the mining computing power and not waste opportunities to earn Pi.

This activity is a continuous psychological suggesting mechanism that strengthens belief in the project day by day. Active participants in this daily ritual also become contributors to the essence of becoming a veteran in the Pi community. It is analogous to being baptized and conferred with a greater sense of mission and greater allegiance to the congregation (Pi community). It instills a strong sense of responsibility for them to “guide” newcomers on how to accomplish the activities and succeed in the platform.

Pi Network’s Religious Experience

The creators of the Pi Network do not promise or guarantee that Pi coins will have any value. They have always positioned the coin as having no monetary value but emphasized that Pi will only be valuable when the community is larger and has more users. There had never been any mention of the Pi coins listed in exchanges. The Pi community responded with a deluge of Pi-based suggested applications in various industries, such as e-commerce games and gambling.

It inspired many community members to hoard large amounts of Pi they couldn’t cash out and use it for bartering in the Pi community. It has been reported in Indonesia that cars and motorcycles get traded in exchange for Pi coins. These actions created a self-fulfilling prophecy. Making people believe that Pi coins are widely accepted and are on track to achieving what many think they could achieve.

Sustained by their strong belief in Pi Network’s doctrine, the community started building simple products and services powered by Pi Coin. The community organically put a value on Pi coin without the need for exchanges to guide price discovery.

Pi Network’s Community

The unwavering and extreme belief of the community in the project’s success is perhaps the key aspect in making this a reality. Despite market conditions and no real economic benefit, the project maintains strong community participation and growth. It can be attributed to its simple design where everyone can easily participate without the usual steep learning curve associated when using new technology.

The invitation process makes it very easy to create a church-like small group community distinguishing between a circle of close acquaintances and a social network of strangers. It makes it easier to supervise the implementation of ordinances urgently needed in the early phases of the project. According to gathered data, more than 60% of invites in the network are close friends rather than strangers.

Lessons Learned from Pi Network

Like many other cryptocurrencies, Pi Network is still a work in progress. But very few have experienced the same growth and support as Pi Network has despite having no apparent value of its native coin. As it stands, only one exchange has listed Pi coins with deposits suspended as of this writing. There have also been reports that some members of the crypto community are questioning the legitimacy of the Pi Network. Perhaps because it does not follow the typical ways other crypto projects were rolled out.

It might be the reason for the Pi Network’s longevity, offering an innovative way of rolling out a crypto project while keeping it simple and inclusive where anyone can participate. Whether you are a believer or not, one cannot deny Pi’s large following, which illustrates some essential lessons other projects can learn. First, it shows the need for project owners to understand their users. It has been proven time and time again, in the successes of organizations to put the needs of their users first above financial gain.

Second, project owners should ensure that their product or service offering can be understood and used by its target users. Too often, projects are prone to take into account the technical know-how of the likely users of their products and services. The inability of users to understand and use the project is a significant barrier to entry and likely kills any chance of the project going mainstream.

Lastly, instead of focusing on fixing Web 2.0, projects should focus on making good use of humanity. Designing on what they understand and want to use. Ingrain the project into the psyche of its users like religion. Hence, learn how to create a religion-like following where everyone is conditioned to have a strong affinity towards the project’s belief system. At the same time, instilling strong responsibility for them to spread the “good word” or in this case, a life-changing opportunity that may create generational wealth.

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