2025 was a defining year for Pi Network. In February, Pi launched Open Network, unlocking external connectivity and opening the door for Pi’s ecosystem to interact with the broader blockchain world — a milestone achieved after more than six years of building Pi’s infrastructure and community, ensuring real utility was ready at launch.
Pi has continued to build and deliver features that support its longer-term strategy, while expanding into new verticals and resources that strengthen utility for Pioneers everywhere.
Updates from the first 100 days following the launch of Open Network were shared earlier this year in the 100 Days of Open Network blog. The end-of-year recap below focuses on additional key releases and developments since then.
This year’s milestones spanned advances in AI tooling and infrastructure, Pi Network Ventures investments that fueled ecosystem expansion, KYC and Migration improvements that unlocked earlier and wider access, ongoing node and protocol upgrades, and growing ecosystem participation and utility.
AI, Creation, and Human Participation
As AI infrastructure continues to advance, Pi has focused on a set of unresolved challenges of the world: the infancy of the AI application layer, the role of human intelligence in an AI-driven world, and how the benefits of AI-generated production can be distributed to real people in a fair and inclusive way. Pi approaches AI and blockchain together as a system that supports productivity, authenticity, accountability, and the macro-level distribution of AI-driven production to humans through blockchain networks.
- To facilitate a flourishing and prolific AI application layer, Pi App Studio was launched as a gen-AI powered coding tool for creators to easily build and launch Pi apps, without a technical background. This introduced guided app-creation workflows to help creators turn domain knowledge and ideas into functional products published directly to the Pi ecosystem. Over 13,400 Chatbot apps and 24,400 Custom apps were created and published, and more than 51,800 individual Pioneers created apps, including unpublished projects.
- Pi App Studio was updated to enable creators to download, customize, and re-upload code directly in the App Studio.
Pi Network Ventures
Pi Network Ventures, an investment initiative of $100 million held in Pi and USD, was launched by the Pi Foundation to strategically invest in startups and businesses, including those that advance the utility, adoption, and real-world impact of Pi.
Two investments have been announced:
- The initiative’s first investment is OpenMind, a company developing an operating system and open-source protocol for robots to think, learn, and work together—like Android for robots. As part of this collaboration, Pi’s global node network was used in a proof-of-concept project to support decentralized AI training and computing tasks.
- The second investment is CiDi Games, a gaming platform building games integrated with Pi that tens of millions of Pioneers can use, in addition to extending the Pi platform to support other games and developers. Pi’s partnership with CiDi Games was made in part because Pi continues to cultivate the gaming vertical, as gaming fits perfectly in the Pi ecosystem for utility creation and engagement.
KYC and Mainnet Migration
KYC and Mainnet migration processes were improved, with a focus on unblocking participation and enabling more Pioneers to engage with ecosystem utilities.
- Fast Track KYC was released, allowing new Pioneers and non-users to complete Fast Track KYC in order to participate in the Mainnet ecosystem earlier than ever before.
- System process checks enabled over 3.36 million Tentatively KYC’d users to fully pass KYC—out of over 4.76 million Tentative KYC’d Pioneers who became eligible.
- Additional AI integration makes the Standard KYC process faster and more scalable while maintaining accuracy. This cuts the queue of KYC applications waiting for human validators to review and validate by 50%, easing validator-related bottlenecks and potentially reducing the Standard KYC processing time.
Currently, over 17.5 million Pioneers have fully passed KYC and 15.8 million Pioneers have migrated to the Mainnet.
Node and Protocol updates
With over 350,000 Nodes on Testnet representing more than 1 million CPUs, updates focused on supporting Node operators and improving network readiness for future integrations and use cases.
- Node version updates (0.5.2 – 0.5.4)
- Improved overall security
- Renamed the Pi Node app as “Pi Desktop”, allowing the app to be more general and open to current and future integrations and applications on desktop computers that are not necessarily related to Node
- Released a Node ranking page displaying the top 5,000 Pi Nodes based on key performance metrics, including reliability, availability, open ports, total active days, and CPU performance
- Made public keys publicly viewable, so Pioneers can identify their Node in the Node ranking page. The public key can be used to verify and identify a user’s Node
- Enabled and improved the interface of Pi App Studio in the Pi Node/Desktop app
- Improved the system for tracking open ports on Pioneers’ Nodes
- Resolved multiple bugs and issues raised by the community
- The Pi Linux Node release enabled partners and technically capable Pioneers to run standardized, self-updating Node software on Linux, improving operational consistency, accessibility, and long-term infrastructure readiness across the ecosystem.
- Ongoing protocol upgrades, moving from version 19 to version 23, brings new functionality and control to the Pi protocol.
- Pi is exploring a new Node utility in which Pi’s global network of nodes can support decentralized AI training and computing tasks in addition to securing the Pi ledger. The vision is: those requiring computing power for AI model training could pay Node operators in Pi for additional capacity. As mentioned, Pi completed a proof-of-concept project to run computations for OpenMind to begin exploring the applications of this utility.
Ecosystem Utility and Participation
Pi continued supporting ecosystem engagement by supporting app building, enabling practical use cases, and strengthening participation across the network.
- Ecosystem Directory Staking is a platform-level utility that introduces a decentralized way for Pioneers and businesses to actively support and promote the ranking of Pi apps and utilities in the Ecosystem Interface.
- Pi Hackathon 2025, the ecosystem’s first hackathon after the launch of Open Network, invited developers to build and deploy meaningful Pi Apps that empower real-world utility using Pi and help shape the ecosystem. Three winners and five honorable mentions were chosen out of the over 215 completed Mainnet apps submitted.
- The .pi Domains Auction concluded and outlined next steps for domain claiming. The claiming process ensures that domains are used for genuine purposes while minimizing the risk of malicious hoarding.
- The launch of DEX, AMM liquidity pools, and token creation features on Testnet gives developers and Pioneers a live environment to try out the mechanics of decentralized finance (DeFi) inside the Pi ecosystem safely before any Mainnet deployment. The features were recently updated to improve usability and clarity based on initial usage, testing, and user feedback.
- Chengdiao Fan, one of two Pi Founders, spoke at TOKEN2049 in Singapore, where her presentation explored how blockchain can drive real societal utility and impact especially in the age of AI, highlighting current challenges in Web3 and potential solutions for pushing the crypto space towards more innovation in real-world utility rather than focusing solely on liquidity.
Pi Network in 2026: More Building, Utilities, and Use Cases
The Pi community’s efforts this year enabled the launch of Open Network and the many apps, utilities, and features that will continue to be worked on. Pi Network in 2026 will be shaped by Pi’s long term strategies and planning, in addition to Pioneers, developers, and partners building and using the ecosystem together.
As the year comes to a close, Pi remains focused on steady progress, responsible building, and long-term utility creation. Thank you to all Pioneers for being part of the journey, and happy new year!
