index – PiNetwork

Who we know works for Social Chain Inc (making Pi Network)

These people have appeared publicly, on various platforms, representing Pi Network. The official core team of March 2022 was shown in the this video: https://www.reddit.com/r/PiNetwork/comments/tekhh9/pi_day_2022_video/

It has been stated in a press release March 2023 there are around 40 people working for Pi(SocialChain)

• @nicolas – Dr. Nicolas Kokkalis – Head of Technology Github
• Dr. Chengdiao Fan @cfan – Head of Product
• Aurélien Schiltz @aurelien – Linkedin – Fullstack software engineer
• Amalric Lombard de Buffières @Lyriaaw Linkedin – Full Stack developer
• Hugo Alayrangues Linkedin – Progammer
• Pierre Jestin Linkedin – Full stack developer
• @PhilosopherChris – ? – Community Team
• Hakkyung Lee @oaklee – Linkedin – Software Engineer – Github
• Jillian (Zhiyuan) Chen – Business Operation Specialist
• Edwaard (discord) – Twitter
• Swaroop Poudel Linkedin Director Community Success & Partnerships
• Christian Eck @Crypto_Ging – Linkedin – Senior Community Success Specialist Github
• @ihatejam – Former Pi Chat Mod
• @sherriorange – seen on in-app Q&A channel
• Nick Amano Linkedin Software Engineer
• Stephanie Grauer Linkedin Partnerships
• Kevin Beyer, Lead Product Manager Linkedin Appeared on Hackathon 2023 Orientation.
• H3rcy – seen on Pi dev discord
• Zhiyuan C. – Business Operations Specialist Linkedin seen hiring on Linkedin

Ex members of the core team

• @hackapreneur – Justin Wu – Community Team
• Vince McPhillip – Former Co Founder & Head of Community Twitter

Can I work for the Pi Network Company?

Check this link for jobs: https://www.linkedin.com/company/pi-net/jobs/

Unfortunately anyone can say they work for a company on linkedin so you can’t trust the employee claims. Several jobs have been posted by Swaroop Poudel recently.

What are the Pi chat mods?

Chat mods are unpaid volunteers and help other pioneers with problems. Some have been around almost since the beginning. Mods barely know more than the rest of us but have read the public informations more thoroughly. Whether they’re aware of information in this document or not, they tend to stick to the official narrative.

Pi Chat Channel Guide

Community Pi Websites

Pi Whitepapers

Pi Github resources

• rpinetwork Discord: https://discord.gg/Y2V5JTy48J
• Dev Wiki (also lists known apps) https://www.reddit.com/r/PiNetwork/wiki/devresources
• Frequently asked questions https://www.reddit.com/r/PiNetwork/comments/oulhwc/mods_frequently_asked_questions_faq/
• All Pi Related news : https://www.reddit.com/r/PiNetworkNews/
• Security circle sub: https://www.reddit.com/r/PiNetworkSC/
• Pi Explorer template: https://github.com/B-Derouet/pi-explorer

Publicity

• https://www.globenewswire.com/en/search/organization/Pi%2520Network
• Interview with CFan and NK : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I-6SKvg3qeE
• Transcript of Chengdiao Fan with Dorian Langlais :
• Pi Network’s PR Company is Rallypoint PR co founded by Dorian Langlais.
• Pi Network PR contact is Elise Perkins, [email protected]

What is Pi?

The Pi Network is a project which aims to produce a global cryptocurrency called Pi and an ecosystem of apps & utilities in which to use this currency. These apps are being created by 3rd party developers some of which have were developed in a recent Hackathon event.

How many users does Pi have?

Pi officially has 35+ million Engaged Pioneers. An “engaged pioneer” is someone who who completed 3 consecutive mining sessions when the measurement was recorded. EPs excludes known bots and bad actors. Since Lots of people mine sporadically and lots have quit and there’s lots of bots, the actual total number of accounts is much higher. Over 600million! (You can find this information by running the pi node software through fiddler classic with the mitm certificate enabled)

Is this real? Is Pi a scam?

Pi is not a scam. It is a project started by Dr Nicolas Kokkalis, (formerly a computer scientist at Stanford in the BioEngineering Department) to give everyday people access to the utility of cryptocurrency.

This old article deescribes how Pi came to be. https://www.stanforddaily.com/2019/09/16/stanford-grads-develop-cryptocurrency-for-smartphone-users-to-increase-its-accessibility/ It also mentions some initial consultation with Stanford Professor, David Mazieres, the Chief Scientist of the Stellar Development foundation.

Does Pi have investment?

According to recent court papers (see below), there has been at least $800k of investment and the founders have put in money of their own.

The investments were formed of “SAFE” instruments. SAFE is an acronym for “Simple Agreement for Future Equity.”

We don’t know who all the investors are but NK previously co founded a Stanford incubator company called Startx https://startx.com/ so he has the contacts.

https://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2017/03/08/stanfordsstartx-to-be-run-by-alumnus-who-sold-his.html

Known Investors

Companies

What is the court case about?

It’s not our place to comment on the details of this case, you can read it here yourself: https://pdfhost.io/v/YQIZZzB5N_complaintpdf.pdf

These are public records obtainable from the Santa Clara County Court website.
Information in this document proves that Pi Network is being developed by a real startup company.

https://www.docketalarm.com/cases/California_State_Santa_Clara_County_Superior_Court/20CV368601/Vincent_McPhillip_vs_Nicolas_Kokkalis_et_al/

Who owns Pi Network?

The core team work for “Social Chain Inc” https://opencorporates.com/companies/us_ca/C4194899

whose parent company is called “Pi Community Company” – an entity registered in the Cayman Islands https://www.societe.com/societe/pi-community-company-879383214.html. This information is also mentioned in the document above.

Pi Community Company are the owner of the trademarks “Pi”, “Pi Network” and the Pi Logo. (first source:this video 0:27)

What is mining?

Both Apple and Google have banned cryptocurrency mining apps.

The mining is not real. The role of the phone app is to distribute Pi “vouchers” which will be exchanged for Pi coins on Mainnet.

What is minting?

Minting is the process of creating crypto coins or gold bars. 100 Billion Pi coins were minted in the 1st(Genesis) block of the Mainnet.

How much is Pi worth?

Pi value is expected to be determined during mainnet usage. This period is commonly known as “open mainnet”.

The mechanisms by which price consensus will be found are currently unknown.

Do I need to leave the app open to mine? Does the app drain my battery or data?

You don’t have to leave the app open. Your app knows how many Pi vouchers to give you per hour based on your engagement. Invite more people to get a higher hourly rate. Since there’s no mining, the app won’t drain your battery. Heavy use of Pi chat can be draining.

Why is the “mining” happening?

The “mining” is a kind of pre-release mechanism to distribute Pi without congesting the mainnet with transactions. This distribution was started before the mainnet or it’s infrastructure existed. The “mining” is not part of the blockchain and its data is stored centrally.

The Pi Network is a Layer 1 blockchain that is a recompiled code fork of stellar-core> This is the software that the cryptocurrency XLM uses.

In this software, when the mainnet started, 100billion Pi coins were minted.

The Pi Network is not related to or a blockchain fork of the Stellar Network.

What type of consensus algorithm does Pi use?

A Consensus algorithm is a set of rules that determine how independent entities reach agreement.

Pi chain utilizes “Stellar Consensus Protocol” which is an implementation of “Practical Byzantine Fault tolerant consensus”.

pBFT consensus is also used by Ripple, Stellar, Neo, Cosmos, Zilliqa, Hyperledger Fabric, Telegram Catchain, Facebook Diem, Hedera Hashgraph. Networks that utilize Proof of Authority typically include BFT mechanisms,e.g. Solana, Vechain.

pBFT consensus is a solution to the Byzantine Generals Problem

Is Pi Open source?

Pi Network has 2 components. One is a Layer 1 blockchain using open source software. The other is an ecosystem of applications that sits between you and the blockchain.

The configuration files of the blockchain are here: https://github.com/PiCoreTeam/pi-node-docker which is a code fork of https://github.com/stellar/docker-stellar-core-horizon

Pi Mainnet is running stellar-core 18.2.0.rc1

What (Android) Permissions does Pi Browser have?

Version 1.3.0 may request access to

• read your contacts
• run at startup
• read badge notifications
• view network connections
• prevent phone from sleeping
• view wifi connections
• use fingerprint hardware
• receive data from internet
• control vibration
• have full network acccess
• use biometric hardware
• Play install Referrer api

What (Android) Permissions do Pi Network App have?

Version 1.30.3 may request access to

• read your contacts
• run at startup
• view network connections
• read badge notifications
• prevent phone from sleeping
• view wifi connections
• receive data from internet
• control vibration
• have full network access
• Play install Referrer api

The app identifies which of your friends are Pi users so you can easily add them to your “security circle”. SC is supposed to be people you know and trust.

Why is ios asking to allow Pi to track activity across other apps and websites?

Asking this is a new feature of iOS introduced in April 2021. Any app that contains ad code will be doing this, the ad code is doing it not the app maker.
Pi contains ad code from Ironsource.

Why is Pi development taking so long?

Pi have to develop many features that other cryptocurrencies don’t have and resolve millions of bugs found by millions of users using thousands of different models of mobile phone. Here is a summary of the development steps so far

• design an app that can pre-allocate a future crypto coin.
• design a help system with volunteers as moderators
• set up testnet
• design a system to deploy testnet nodes
• design a system to gather and store data about testnet nodes
• design an app that will be users’ interface to the mainnet (pi browser)
• design a wallet for users to interact with the testnet and mainnet
• design an sdk for developers that sits ontop of the blockchain api
• design a system for brainstorming app ideas and managing dev app teams
• design a test for would be developers
• run hackathon for developers
• design a system to collection user reports of issues/bugs
• set up mainnet
• design a system to calculate a complex allocation formula + lockup variables
• design a system that will eliminate people cheating the allocation process and be powered by a mix of ai, algorithm and human validators, aka KYC
• design a system that enables parents to validate their children.
• design a system to register wallets, distribute pi on the mainnet according to the allocation database and do lockups
• ensure developed pi apps are sufficiently functional for mainnet.
• design a system that creates wallets and claimable balances on mainnet for migrated users.
• further develop SDK
• Unknown

What is the total supply?

The mainnet supply of Pi is 100billion coins

This number is specified in the source code of the software.

(around) Line 79 In this file : https://github.com/stellar/stellar-core/blob/master/src/ledger/LedgerManagerImpl.cpp

This value is the sum of all the fractions, e.g. each dollar contains 100 cents

When Mainnet started, the total supply first exists in a special genesis account which is then used to fund a new account with all the coins in. This account is from which distribution begins.

How will the total supply be distributed?

• 65 Billion pi for current and future mining
• 10 Billion pi for community endeavours
• 5 Billion pi for liquidity pools
• 20 Billion pi for the developers(core team/socialchain inc/) + probably investors

How many pioneers have migrated to mainnet?

The number is currently approximately 2 million

How many transactions have occurred on mainnet?

Currently over 800 thousand payments between pioneers have occurred.

What is Enclosed Mainnet?

“Enclosed Mainnet” or the Mainnet Firewall is a narrative to restrict the activities of Pioneers who have been migrated to Mainnet. Pioneers are not allowed to sell Pi for fiat current or trade it for other cryptocurrencies and can only trade pi to other users for items or use pi in apps within the “Pi Browser App”

Whilst Core team can’t stop anyone trading Pi for fiat/crypto anyone caught doing it on a large scale will have their mining account frozen and their wallet account can be blacklisted in Pi controlled Apps.

How are exchanges listing Pi?

All exchange markets trade virtual currency whilst they hold the real coins in their hot and cold wallets. You only see real coins when you withdraw them.

There’s nothing stopping them running a market if they don’t allow withdrawals aka proving they have the coins. They don’t have any coins as far as we know.

Whilst it’s technically possible they could enable deposits and withdrawals, the Pi Core Team could easily ban users for sending pi to exchanges.

What is verification?

Verification is so you can retrieve your account on another device or change your password. Doing both is not required.

If you have verified your Pi account with Facebook, then you are not required to verify your phone number.

You will be prompted to register your email but currently there’s no means to recover your account with your email address (2023 not sure if this is still the case)

What is KYC?

KYC stands for “know your customer”. It’s the practice carried out by companies to verify the identity of their clients in compliance with legal requirements.

Pi uses it for another reason – the rule is 1 account per person. KYC is being used to eliminate bots farming Pi as every account needs to be attached to a real verifiable person. Only accounts that pass KYC are being migrated to mainnet.

If any of your referrals quit or fail KYC, you will lose all the bonus you received from them. This also applies to security circle

KYC for 200k node operators and some random pioneers was done by a third party called Yoti. Since Core Team could not afford millions of KYC checks they’ve designed their own KYC Solution.

The Pi Core Team has developed a KYC solution that initally enrolled 100 Pioneers per country. These Pioneers had an opportunity to KYC early and help improve our app’s algorithms. Since Pi day 2022, the KYC solution is rolling out by inviting Pioneers randomly to take the KYC process.

Progress is slow due bugs still being ironed out, a backlog of submissions, and the process of accepting new validators.

How does Pi KYC work?

Pi KYC solution itself combines machine automation and human verification in order to accomplish accurate and efficient KYC for everyone. Machine automation will be responsible for image processing, text extraction, fake ID detection, liveness check and image comparison. KYC’ed human verifiers may then have to check for errors. The importance of having and improving the machine automation component are twofold: 1) scalability to KYC millions of Pioneers and 2) reducing the data exposure to human verifiers to better protect Pioneers’ privacy. Your participation in the current pilot release of the KYC app will help improve the machine automation to satisfy these goals.

KYC Demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uXhwP8PSCuQ

How is Pi handling European data protection?

“NOTICE TO EU DATA SUBJECTS” section.

“We value your privacy and your rights as a data subject and have therefore appointed Prighter Group with its local partners as our privacy representative and your point of contact. If you want to contact us via our representative Prighter or make use of your data subject rights, please visit the following website.”

https://prighter.com/q/16457313501.

Why did earlier members mine at a higher rate?

Pi Network used a halving system that incentivizes users to join sooner rather than later. When the population increased by a factor of 10, a halving of the basic pi per hour rate occurs. This system also ensured that large pi holders are scarce.

What is the Ambassador role? How does the earning team work?

You become an Ambassador when new members join your earning team by using your referral code when they sign up. Each member of your earning team provides a small boost to your Pi per hour when they are active themselves. Once a member has joined they can’t switch teams.

What is the Contributor role? How do I become a contributor?

You get a bonus to Pi per hour by inviting 3-5 people to your security circle.

What is the security circle for?

Currently the SC enables you to get a boost to tokens per hour. With Mainnet we believe the security circle will help determine which nodes are trustworthy. This is necessary because Pi Network doesn’t have known verifiable organizations running it’s nodes.

Can I withdraw my Pi? What is the timeline for withdrawals?

Withdrawal is expected in the Open phase of Mainnet. This may happen in 2023.

What is Lockup?

Lockup is a scheme to minimize the amount of Pi in circulation on Mainnet.

Your pi number that shows in the app is the combination of 2 buckets: Verified Pi and Unverified Pi – unverified pi is the bonus amount you have from people who haven’t passed KYC (yet).

You will be able to allocate a portion of verified Pi to the lockup and in return get a bonus to your mining rate.

This scheme works using claimable balance operations https://developers.stellar.org/docs/glossary/claimable-balance/

When the lockup expires you’ll be able to relock your Pi. source

Why are there ads in the Pi app?

There were no ads for the first year and a half. The core team asked the community on how to raise money to help with the server costs and ads were voted by the pioneers. You can read about that here: https://cryptotapas.com/pi-network-app-ads-and-nodes/

You can disable the ads for 2 weeks by going to the profile settings. Approx 20% of pioneers have issues disabling ads also many Pioneers haven’t seen an ad for months/years.

What happened to Fever IQ

Fever IQ was a Pi app created by the Liphardt Lab at Stanford to track covid symptoms. This later became a company called Enya AI and the app became this website FeverIQ.com.

Here’s a paper on the data: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.09.23.20200006v2

How can I learn about Pi Blockchain?

Pi blockchain is a code fork of open source software Stellar Core which is used by the cryptocurrency XLM.

You could learn about Pi Blockchain by installing a Stellar Core node

Dr David Mazières, Professor of Computing at Stanford invented “Stellar consensus protocol” which is based on “Byzantine Fault Tolerance consensus”. There’s a google talk of his about Stellar Consensus on Youtube

You can learn about specific features of Stellar with the Stellar Quest app. These are a series of challenges involving stellar features. These will be useful if you’re a developer.

What is a Node, Explain like I’m 5, ?

When you pay in a shop by card, the card machine checks with your bank that you have money. In cryptocurrency, the card machine knows how much money you have and doesn’t have to ask your bank.

In Pi Network the nodes are a network of card machines who all know your balance.

Obviously it would be a problem if you go in 1 shop spend some money then go in another shop whose card machine isn’t up to date and spend the same money again.

A cryptocurrency network ensures this situation doesn’t happen.

What is the Node really all about?

Nodes submit and verify transactions on the Pi network. Currently Pioneers only run nodes on testnet. The composition of mainnet is unknown.

There’s a block explorer here: https://pi-blockchain.net/

There’s 2 versions of Pi nodes.

The first version tests the performance of your computer and checks if you have successfully opened and forwarded ports. Whilst running this version the windows application periodically sends performance data to PiHQ

Shortly later you will have the consensus container deployed to your computer.

The current consensus container is a stellar Core v15.2 Node.

Despite being called a consensus container the node you get is a watcher node that observes consensus and can submit transactions. Though in testnet all transactions are submitted through Pi browser to Core Team’s validator nodes.

You can install the performance test node from https://node.minepi.com/

This software requires virtualization enabled in the bios, Hyper-V, Windows subsystem for linux v2, docker

There are many guides at https://github.com/pi-node/instructions/wiki

There’s also a comprehensive guide at https://node-pi.com/pinode_eng

How to free up diskspace the Node is using.

See this post: https://www.reddit.com/r/PiNetwork/comments/n3t0qg/node_044_what_to_do/

Where to go with node problems?

Ask here: https://github.com/pi-node/instructions/issues or ask @ bamisonic in the pi chat node channel (new node operators are added to this channel in batches). You can post screenshots in this channel.

See this explanation of the node rewards

PSA: Node Reward Calculation from PiNetwork

What evidence of the mainnet is there?

Pi Block explorer

Mainnet API

You can connect mainnet to the stellar laboratory with the horizon URL : https://api.mainnet.minepi.com and passphrase : “Pi Network”

Will there be a linux node?

Nicolas said in the developer chatroom that they’re working on it. Several mentions have occurred on the developer discord.

Who are (potential) competitors of Pi

• Clover
• Utrust
• Stellar Lumens
• Kin
• Electroneum
• Celo
• Kasta
• Worldcoin
• Xfinite Entertainment token

What if I’m not convinced?

If you’re unconvinced and still think Pi is a scam of some kind, please report the American subsidiary “Social Chain inc” to the Federal Trade Commission who investigate fraudulent American companies

https://www.ftc.gov/faq/consumer-protection/submit-consumer-complaint-ftc