Pi Network 于 9 月 15 日发布协议 27。七年的建设即将接受考验。

Protocol 27 delivers smart contract authentication, an automated market maker DEX, and RPC server infrastructure to a blockchain with 14 million migrated users. The September 15 mainnet activation is the moment Pi Network proves it can build real products or admits that seven years of mobile mining was the product all along.

Summary Pi Network will activate Protocol 27 on mainnet September 15, 2026, completing testnet deployment that began August 21 and bringing automated market maker liquidity pools, smart contract authentication, and RPC infrastructure to production.

The upgrade follows Protocol 26, which forced all 421,000 node operators to update by August 11 or lose connectivity, clearing the path for the final planned protocol upgrade.

Pi Launchpad already stress tested the DEX on testnet through the SLICE token launch, drawing 242,000 Pioneers who committed 15.92 million Test-Pi across 17 days.

PI trades near $0.095 with a $1.06 billion market cap as of early September 2026, down more than 97% from its February 2025 all-time high of $2.99, weighed by monthly token unlocks releasing roughly 6.5 million coins per day.

The Pi Core Team released PiVerify, Pi Sign-In, and SoloHost at Pi2Day 2026, giving external developers identity tools and a computing framework that did not exist a year ago.

Protocol 27 delivers smart contract authentication, an automated market maker DEX, and RPC server infrastructure to a blockchain with 14 million migrated users. The September 15 mainnet activation is the moment Pi Network proves it can build real products or admits that seven years of mobile mining was the product all along.

Pi Network has spent seven years telling the world that it is building something different. On September 15, the world gets to check the receipts.

Protocol 27 is the upgrade the Pi Core Team has called the “final planned” protocol change in the current development sequence. That phrase carries weight. It means the team believes the base layer is finished, or close enough to finished that everything coming next sits on top of it rather than inside it. Smart contract authentication, automated market maker liquidity pools, RPC server infrastructure, and a decentralized exchange that already drew 242,000 testers on testnet are all part of the package. When Protocol 27 goes live, the excuses run out.

The timing is deliberate. Pi closed August at $0.0909, sitting more than 97% below the $2.99 all-time high it touched when the open mainnet launched external trading in February 2025. Monthly token unlocks dump roughly 6.5 million PI per day into circulation. Exchange listings on OKX, Bitget, Gate.io, and MEXC have not stopped the bleeding. Binance still has not listed the token despite an 86.8% community vote in favor. The market has been patient with Pi Network for a long time. Protocol 27 is where patience converts into a verdict.

LATEST: $Pi | @PiCoreTeam releases details on the ecosystem token design on Pi Network as a Pi Request for Comment (PRC) to the community.

Find out more here: https://t.co/IrWSLaq0G4 pic.twitter.com/6KaozGv9EI — crypto.news (@cryptodotnews) February 23, 2026

From Stanford dorm room to 60 million Pioneers

Pi Network launched on March 14, 2019, Pi Day, built by three Stanford graduates who believed cryptocurrency was too hard for normal people to access. Nicolas Kokkalis, a computer science Ph.D. whose doctoral work at Stanford involved building smart contract frameworks on fault-tolerant distributed systems before Ethereum existed, led the technical side. Chengdiao Fan, also a Stanford Ph.D., handled product. Vincent McPhillip, an MBA graduate, ran growth. Visiting researcher Aurelien Schiltz rounded out the founding team.

The pitch was simple: mine crypto on your phone without draining the battery. Tap a button once a day. Invite friends. Build a security circle. The mining was not proof of work in any traditional sense. It was closer to a faucet with social verification layered on top. Critics called it a glorified sign-up counter. Supporters called it the most accessible onboarding mechanism crypto had ever seen.

Both sides had a point. By 2026, Pi Network claims more than 60 million registered users across 200 countries. That number makes it one of the largest user bases in all of cryptocurrency. But registered users and active participants are not the same thing. Roughly 19 million have completed KYC verification. About 14 million have migrated their tokens to mainnet. The gap between 60 million and 14 million tells you something about friction, about how many people tapped that button and then never came back when the network asked them to prove they were real.

The KYC system itself is worth examining. Pi uses a combination of AI-powered document verification and human validators who review applications and flag inconsistencies. The process includes liveness detection, sanctions screening, AML checks, and duplicate account detection. The Core Team has said openly that their KYC is designed to reject accounts, not rubber-stamp them. That philosophy has slowed migration but produced a verified user base that few crypto projects can match in scale.

Pi Network has positioned its 18 million verified users as a competitive advantage rather than a vanity metric. Whether that advantage translates into economic activity is exactly what Protocol 27 needs to prove.

What Protocol 27 actually changes

Strip away the marketing language and Protocol 27 does three things that matter.

Smart contract authentication. This is the headline feature. Protocol 27 expands how applications verify user identity within on-chain logic, building on the Pi Sign-In and PiVerify infrastructure the Core Team released at Pi2Day 2026 in June. In practical terms, smart contracts on Pi can now support more advanced permission rules. Accounts and applications get more flexible, more secure ways to authorize transactions. If you are building an app on Pi and you need to confirm that the user interacting with your contract is a real, KYC-verified person, Protocol 27 gives you the on-chain tools to do that without relying on off-chain workarounds.

This is not a small thing. Identity-gated smart contracts are something the broader crypto industry has talked about for years without shipping at scale. Pi is not claiming to have solved decentralized identity, but it is claiming to have built authentication primitives that work within its own ecosystem. The difference between those two claims matters, and Protocol 27 is where the distinction gets tested.

RPC server infrastructure. Protocol 27 adds the plumbing that external developers need to connect to the Pi blockchain without running a full node. RPC servers are not glamorous. They do not make headlines. But they are the reason developers can build on Ethereum, Solana, or any other chain without downloading the entire blockchain first. Pi has been criticized for years for making it difficult for outside developers to build on the network. RPC infrastructure is the fix.

Automated market maker and DEX. The integrated order book and AMM decentralized exchange moves from testnet to mainnet. This is where Pi token holders will be able to swap tokens, provide liquidity, and participate in new token launches through the Pi Launchpad without leaving the Pi ecosystem. The AMM model means liquidity pools set prices algorithmically rather than relying on traditional order matching.

Protocol 27 targets September 15 as the mainnet deployment date, with three weeks of testing across Testnet 1 and Testnet 2 before activation. The timeline is aggressive. It is also the kind of timeline that a project in Pi’s position needs to hit.

The SLICE test that nobody outside Pi noticed

Before Protocol 27 goes live, the Pi Launchpad already ran what amounts to a full dress rehearsal. From June 11 to 28, the Core Team launched SLICE, a test token with no monetary value, on the testnet DEX. The results deserve attention even though they happened in a sandbox.

242,000 Pioneers participated. They committed 15.92 million Test-Pi toward token acquisition. The launch tested the full Launchpad lifecycle: token issuance, AMM pool creation, liquidity bootstrapping, and real-time price discovery through swaps. The Core Team revised the participation model after the first test round to simplify the user experience and improve fairness, adding a fair access mechanism designed to prevent large participants from dominating token allocations.

The Pi Mainnet is upgrading to Protocol 26. Deadline: Aug. 11.

All Mainnet node operators must complete the upgrade before the deadline to remain connected to the network. Details here: https://t.co/9VehO7hhj1

Protocol 26 is a major milestone ahead of the final planned upgrade,… — Pi Network (@PiCoreTeam) July 29, 2026

Those numbers matter for a specific reason. A DEX is only as useful as the people who show up to use it. Getting 242,000 participants in a testnet exercise where the tokens have zero real value suggests genuine curiosity, or at least muscle memory from years of tapping buttons. The question Protocol 27 answers is whether those same users show up when real money is on the line.

The SLICE test also revealed something about Pi’s approach to DEX design. Rather than copying Uniswap’s pure AMM model or building a traditional central limit order book, Pi Launchpad combines both. The hybrid model lets price discovery happen through automated curves while still allowing limit orders. It is a design choice that suggests the Core Team is thinking about users who have never used a DEX before, which tracks with Pi’s entire history of prioritizing accessibility over sophistication.

Pi2Day and the developer toolkit that changed the pitch

On June 28, Pi2Day 2026, the Core Team dropped three products that quietly shifted what Pi Network is. Before Pi2Day, Pi was a blockchain with a big user base and limited developer tools. After Pi2Day, it became a blockchain with a big user base, identity infrastructure, and a computing framework.

You might also like: Pi Network first year on open mainnet

SoloHost is an open, permissionless framework on Pi Desktop where developers can build and list apps that run local AI and distributed computing workloads. Users discover and run these apps on their own machines, interacting through mobile devices on Pi Browser. The pitch is that Pi’s 60 million users are not just token holders. They are potential compute nodes.

Pi Sign-In lets users log into third-party websites and applications using their Pi accounts. No separate usernames. No separate passwords. For developers, it means access to Pi’s 18 million KYC-verified users without building an identity system from scratch.

PiVerify is the business-facing identity layer. It offers document verification, liveness detection, sanctions screening, AML checks, and duplicate account detection through a combination of AI and human review. This is Pi selling its KYC infrastructure as a service to companies that need compliant identity verification but do not want to build it themselves.

Pi shipped its DEX while the broader market looked away, and the developer tools that launched alongside it may matter more than the exchange itself. Identity is the one thing Pi has that most chains do not. PiVerify and Pi Sign-In turn that advantage into products other businesses can actually use.