Pi Network’s native token has moved again, but this time in the opposite direction of what the project’s multi-million-strong community hoped for.
The recent drop occurred amid heightened expectations around protocol updates and several team announcements.
PI Drops Again
The popular altcoin has experienced better periods, and those were not long ago. Two months ago PI surged to $0.30 amid growing excitement about a prospective listing on the veteran U.S. exchange Kraken. That rally turned into a classic sell-the-news event: after the token began trading, it quickly fell back to its initial post-listing level around $0.18.
Subsequent breakout attempts were modest, with PI repeatedly stalled at roughly $0.20. By late April bearish momentum took hold and has largely dominated price action since then. PI found a temporary support zone near $0.17 and spent several weeks trading sideways between $0.17 and $0.18.
Over the weekend the token faced rejection that pushed it down to $0.155, a three-month low. In the past 12 hours broader market weakness triggered another selloff, and while many altcoins fell, PI’s decline was particularly steep—dropping another 6% to trade below $0.15.
Market capitalization has fallen beneath $1.6 billion, moving PI well outside the top 50 altcoins by that measure.
Protocol Update Still Pending
Beyond recent safety notices for users and an important KYC announcement, the Pi team previously set a deadline for migrating the protocol upgrade v23. After completing earlier releases such as v19.6, v19.9, v20.2, and v22, the team targeted May 15 as the rollout date for v23.
That date has passed without an official confirmation from the Core Team that the migration finished successfully. Discussion on social platforms is mixed: some users claim the update has been deployed, while others say it may require a few more days to complete.
Despite the uncertainty around timing, many in the community expect v23 to be transformative for the Pi ecosystem. The upgrade is widely anticipated to unlock native smart contract support, enable decentralized applications (dApps), and lay groundwork for a Pi decentralized exchange (Pi DEX).