Today, we are looking back and documenting our learnings from the Enclosed Mainnet phase of Pi Network. Specifically, decision making by the Pi Core Team.

1. Path of Least & Most Resistance

2. Design Choices — KYC, Hype, Ecosystem, Hackathons, dApps & PiFestivals

3. Key takeaways — The preferences of the Pi Core Team

THE RESISTANCE BROTHERS

Path Of Least Resistance

You have probably come across the term of path of least resistance in self-help and business teachings. Simply put, it is the easiest or simplest course of action.

In terms of life, it would be doing just enough to maintain the status quo — to keep things as they are, or keep going with the bare minimum of energy expended.

In terms of cryptocurrency, it’s copying the latest trendy blockchain protocol, launching a token based off the latest meme, developers rugpulling the token for personal gains, promoting fraudulent cryptocurrency projects, opting with hype over value creation, or abandoning development when things become harder.

Whereas in life, the ramifications of opting with the path of least resistance does not show immediately, in cryptocurrency, they manifest rapidly. Just one poor decision by the coin's creators can cause your investment’s value to evaporate.

Path Of Most Resistance

Marching on the path of most resistance is like swimming against the flow in a river. It is hard work! So why on earth would anyone pick the path of least resistance’s lost brother instead?

Sometimes just for the sake of challenge, but sometimes it’s a hard, yet necessary path to take in order to keep the values in tact and not compromise.

There are too many projects that start with a good idea (and hopefully some sort of a minimum viable product too), just so they can launch their coin. It makes sense because development and human resources cost considerable amounts of money.

Too many times, however, the core teams are softly forced to make design choices that puts profit or speed first (because of investors and self interest), versus technology, security or value. This is because the clock is always ticking. Investors only come and stay if they see gains. They quickly shift their moneys elsewhere, if their hunger for gains isn’t satiated quick enough.

The Pi Core Team has managed to create both community and technology over the years, without a price action pressure to worry about. Therefor they are able make the most optimal for the longevity design choices for Pi Network itself.

Now that you’ve met the 2 “brothers” of resistances, we are going to take a look at some of the decision-making the Pi Core Team has done to see what we can learn their strategy.

ECOSYSTEM DESIGN CHOICES

KYC

In Pi Network’s case, deciding to create its own KYC was a one-way street down the path of most resistance. There are existing KYC solutions on the market already, many of which would have been possible to integrate. These solutions cost money, and when you have millions of users, those $1-$2 cost / KYC checks quickly add up.

Admittedly, with the advertisements running in the app, this could have possibly been covered (but even if the whole network KYC’ed quickly, the Pi ecosystem would lack apps and utility). However, different KYC solutions cover different countries. Meaning, we would have needed a variety of KYC solutions integrated because Pi has users in every country!

Opting to build our own Pi KYC is a gigantic undertaking but it makes sense:

• It’s our own! — we built it, so it can be tailored it to meet our needs.

• It’s a use-case for Pi — 1 KYC check costs 1Pi (not a bad deal!)

• KYC doesn’t cost a penny — the cost of doing Pi KYC is 1 Pi. This is much more convenient than having to pay via bank cards for KYC.

• Earning opportunity — pioneers can earn Pi for validating KYCs.

• Businesses may use it in the future — the Pi KYC infrastructure can be customized to facilitate KYC for other businesses in the future.

• Not relying on others — additional freedom by not being attached.

• Data protection — the data is collected kept safe by the core team and information isn’t passed or sold to 3rd parties.

• Pi payment only = no fiat needed — The Pi app was always meant to be free, but putting the earned coins behind a paywall would have raised some serious red flags.

• Enables extra time to build the Pi ecosystem — By quickly solving the KYC problem, we would still have a major red flag: no utility for Pi. Building our own KYC solution means there’s time to build the Pi ecosystem, so we have more use-cases and utilities for Pi.

These reasons may not be apparent at first, but in this case, choosing the path of most resistance was right move to make for the long-term. Having our own Pi KYC infrastructure is a great asset. You can bet on it being utilized even more in the future.

Hype

Pi Network went through cycles of rapid growths over the past years. Why were these not utilized to fuel a massive hype wave to bring in millions of investors to buy Pi? After all, the only thing that will push the price of Pi up is buyers, right?

Right, but hype is not a reliable long term strategy. Hype is capable of pushing prices up quickly, but the biggest problem with hype is that it lasts a short time. Same as when a meme goes viral, people talk about it and it’s everywhere — yet, in a few days and only a fraction of people care about it.

In terms of cryptocurrency terms: you can generative hype quickly and this will create buying pressure, so price increases. The side-effect is that hype dies off quickly and the growth can evaporate with it just as quickly. The quicker an asset’s price rises, the quicker an asset’s price can fall.

Coin developers love to take advantage of people’s greed by releasing coins that do not do anything (or are copycats of others), but package them up and sell them like they’re the best thing ever.

The Pi Core Team does things different: they are building the infrastructures of Pi Network and putting together all the pieces to support the next wave of crypto users, before a price action. They believe the product will speak for itself as they’ve had years to iterate. Time will tell.

Ecosystem

The long-term strategy of Pi is this: The Pi Core Team, alongside with hundreds of community developers, are building the Pi ecosystem to be the go-to place for pioneers. This gives pioneers countless ways to spend Pi in both the digital and physical worlds. When Pi has use-cases and it is used frequently, it becomes a useful digital money that makes sense owning — either for purchasing goods and services, or holding as an investment.

Now imagine the Pi ecosystem as a purple App Store. You can find decentralized applications to use, similar to the existing applications you use today, but those Pi dApps use Pi for payments instead of charging one of your bank cards — that’s the digital side of the Pi ecosystem, which we’ll talk about shortly.

The physical side of the story is when Pi is accepted in shops near where you live. This is arguably a more risky, challenging and time-consuming task to achieve, but we want to see real life businesses accepting Pi, so pioneers can pay easily just like with fiat money.

The prime example of solid progress is South Korea, where over 400 stores already accept Pi (even without a price). Currently, business owners set the exchange rate and it is usually a part payment. For example if you go out for dinner, the restaurant may accept 30% of the payment at $20 / Pi rate, and the remainder in fiat. (Note: this variable method will change after there is market price after open mainnet.)

There are shops in other countries in the world, but South Korea gives us a look into the near future after open mainnet. Not every shop will accept Pi, nor do we go to every shop that exists — instead, as pioneers, we’ll go to the pioneer shops.

Pi Apps & Hackathons

If we want Pi to be used as payment, then we need apps using Pi. This is the digital side of the story. These apps not only take time to be created, but need further time to be iterated so they become polished. Most cryptocurrencies have millions of dollars set aside as incentive for developers to build on their network. Pi Network does not.

Over the past 5 years, we have witnessed continuous efforts placed on creating, incentivizing and nurturing Pi apps. These efforts come in the following:

• Pi Brainstorm App — an application created by the Pi Core Team that allows pioneers to create Pi projects and crowdsource people to build them.

• Pi Hackathons — Hackathons are short term races for developers to build apps utilizing Pi Network with a prize pool for the winners.

• Review and Support — apps utilizing Pi Network are checked by the Core Team to be evaluated, after which they get support and advice. There’s also a Discord for Pi app developers for further direct support.

So instead of going on a cash-fuelled quest for developers to build use-cases for Pi, the team spends constant effort on searching from (mainly) within its pioneer audience by holding monthly hackathons. Incentives for Pi developers include some Pi and the winners of the hackathons receive recognition, as well as some support with maintenance costs in forms of grants. There’s no other way to put it: in comparison to incentives by other coins, Pi incentives are small.

This method is the slow, organic type — but it does bring committed developer teams who are fans of Pi Network. Most of them are reputable pioneers wanting to create something good for the community naturally — not short term opportunists.

We can commend the team for trying their best with limited resources. It’s yet another endeavour down the for them on the path of most resistance, where most other founders would have opt to just launch open mainnet and build later, or disregard the ecosystem side completely to launch the coin without any real utility or usage. There are countless coins opting for those easy choices of least resistance, but they are nowhere to be seen. Coincidence? 

PiFestivals

PiFestivals take place digitally, now monthly, with a different theme each time. The main location for these purple festivals is the Fireside Forum dApp created by the Pi Core Team. This is a different approach of sharing Pi-related content, utilizing Pi as a way to rank posts higher. The forum comes with a decentralized moderation system.

Pi Network has had a photography festival, a music festival, a Pi art festival and more. But the upcoming one is an important one: the Commerce festival. This is a follow-up event for the Pi Commerce Hackathon, where developers created dApps using Pi to facilitate trade between businesses and customers locally. Although Map of Pi and PyNook won the Hackathon in March, not many people use them.

Like we said earlier, iterating and polishing is a huge time-sink. The winners of the hackathon created Minimum Viable Products, which need further work to be attractive for users. This follow-up Commerce PiFestival will boost those dApps’ presences, and hopefully thousands of pioneers try them out, connect with local businesses and trade for goods and services. It would really be amazing seeing thousands of shops available worldwide, so pioneers can explore and experience shopping locally with Pi, just like many do in South Korea.

PiFestivals help keep the community engaged — even though majority of pioneers are now disregarding any news aside of the announcement of open mainnet. This must be as obvious to the Core Team as it is for pioneers, but they must prioritize carefully.

They focus on areas that bring the Pi ecosystem up to a high standard. This is a condition, which is needed so we reach the open mainnet phase. There are indeed many other things that could be prioritized such as decentralization or creating a price action. The Core Team knows this, and is instead going with a strategy that supports Pi long term by creating a sustainable ecosystem full of apps, systems, businesses and people.

CONCLUSION

Imagine launching a coin and not having a market price for it after 5+ years. Kinda crazy, huh?

This is precisely the case with Pi Network, and in today’s newsletter we shed some light into their decision making, reasonings and objectives. Some of our observations of their design philosophy include preferences such as:

• Utility > Hype

• Integrity > Speed

• Long term > Short term

• Organic growth > Inorganic growth

• Create our own > Use anyone else’s

By knowing the preferred values of the Pi Core Team, our view of the project becomes clearer and we see more accurately how they envision the Pi project to become.

It sucks to wait, but at least the wait is worth it considering the Pi Network isn’t standing on paper legs like many others. Pi Network doesn’t rely on other businesses, coins or partnerships to see success. We are doing our very own thing, only. Period.

With each day passing, the systems and infrastructures are becoming stronger to support our millions of users. This is great because they will indeed need to be strong enough as Pi Network is coming after the next 1 billion users.

That’s a wrap from us today!

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