Stanford Daily article (September 16, 2019) — Pi Network founding team

Article content:

Pi Network was launched on March 14, 2019 by Dr. Nicolas Kokkalis ’13, Dr. Chengdiao Fan ’14, Vince McPhilip MBA ’18, and visiting student researcher Aurélien Schiltz. At the time of writing, it already has more than 500k users.

Goal: to reinvent Bitcoin as a social, mobile-first currency so that anyone with a smartphone can use it.

Security mechanism: Pi does not use energy-intensive algorithms like Bitcoin does. Instead, it secures its ledger through members “mutually guaranteeing” one another, forming social “security circles,” thereby building a “global trust map” that indicates who can be trusted to record transactions. This enables mining to be done directly on a phone—free, low battery consumption, and a low environmental footprint.

Origins of the idea: it comes from the CS 359B “Decentralized Applications on the Blockchain” course that Kokkalis taught in the spring of 2018, when he saw just how difficult blockchain was for the general public to access.

The article cites supporting views from Stanford professors (Michael Bernstein, David Mazières, Jan Liphardt), emphasizing that Pi focuses on usability and broad adoption.