Emilo labs

Pi Coin Fiasco: The Final Act of a 6-Year Fairy Tale

For six long years, the Pi Coin team made money by making people watch ads under the promise of “the currency of the future!” Now, they’ve finally decided to go open mainnet. The funniest part? Even they didn’t believe their project would ever get listed because, let’s be honest, there was no real blockchain infrastructure behind it. Most likely, it was just a simple database, running on a system no different from a mobile game’s point-collection mechanic.

But then things got out of hand. The community grew so large over six years that the Pi team could no longer sustain the illusion. At first, they kept users busy with the old “watch ads, get rich later” routine, but when ad revenue was no longer enough to keep the machine running, panic set in. The community started rebelling, threatening not to click on ads anymore unless Pi got listed. And so, the team had to act.

Instead of building something from scratch, they conveniently jumped on the Stellar network—because why put in the effort when you can just piggyback on an existing system? They essentially did what people do on Solana with meme coins, slapping Pi onto a pre-made system and calling it a day.

But they didn’t stop there. They decided to sprinkle in some fake mysticism to make the project seem more "special." Enter 314—a number they started shoving into every possible detail. The open mainnet launch? Oh, it just had to be on February 20th, exactly 314 days before the end of the year. The time between the project announcement and the mainnet launch? 314 weeks. They tried to sell this as some kind of grand mathematical genius move when all people cared about was: "When will this thing be worth real money?"

continuation in the next post...