Pi Network is launching its first smart contract capability on Pi Testnet: subscription support!
Subscriptions are one of the most common business models among services in modern society, but they have been difficult to implement on blockchain systems. By bringing subscriptions to the ecosystem using Pi’s smart contract capability, Pi is fostering use cases that map directly to real products and recurring utility-driven services such as e-commerce, streaming, online tools, and more, built on blockchain.
This builds on the recent node and protocol upgrades that prepared the blockchain for smart contract functionality, along with the Pi Testnet RPC server release that gave developers a practical way to interact with blockchain data and test application flows.
To open the subscription smart contract to technical review and community feedback, Pi has released the second Pi Request for Comment (PiRC2).
PiRC2 gives developers and other reviewers a chance to examine the design closely, identify bugs or edge cases, if any, and suggest improvements. It also gives the ecosystem a way to evaluate the contract before rollout to the Mainnet.
The smart contract itself is also being reviewed by external auditing services.
How the Subscription Smart Contract Works
The subscription smart contract gives developers and businesses a way to build recurring service models into applications or their local commerce while processing the payments through the blockchain and preserving subscriber control over funds.
A key part of the design is that subscribers can approve a defined budget for the contract to use, without needing to re-sign every billing event. That approval can also be limited to a defined billing horizon, such as monthly charges for up to one year. At the same time, the approved funds remain in the wallet until charges are actually processed. As long as the wallet has enough balance when a charge comes due, the subscription remains in effect, instead of requiring the full budget to be locked up in advance.
This allows the contract to support recurring payments without giving up the wallet-level control that blockchain systems are meant to preserve or sending the total budget out to the contract.
The Technical Innovation
Subscriptions are not a new idea in blockchain, but they have usually involved tradeoffs on the blockchain. For example, other blockchains* have had proposed standards for recurring payments, but these approaches have generally come with tradeoffs such as off-chain coordination, repeated authorization, or added account infrastructure.
Pi’s model takes a different approach. It is designed to let subscriptions work without requiring a new signature for every billing event, while still keeping the approved funds in the subscriber’s wallet until billing actually happens. That is a meaningful design choice in Web3, where recurring payments have often been harder to implement cleanly without adding friction, pre-funding, or extra infrastructure.
Developers: Test Subscriptions and Review PiRC2
The subscription capability offers an early look at how smart contracts on Pi may be developed and tested. At this stage, the focus is on technical review, bug identification, and experimentation at the command-line and backend level.
With PiRC2 now published, developers are encouraged to review the subscription contract design, surface bugs or edge cases, and suggest improvements.
*Recurring subscriptions have been explored in other blockchain ecosystems, but often with added complexity. For example, on Ethereum, EIP-1337 proposed “subscriptions on the blockchain” using signed subscription data stored off-chain and later submitted for execution. ERC-4337 account abstraction explicitly relies on higher-layer smart-account infrastructure.