Official Blog Update;

Pi Network will launch its first smart contract feature on Pi Testnet: Subscription Support!

Subscriptions are one of the most common business models in modern service industries, but implementing them on blockchain systems is challenging. By leveraging Pi’s smart contract capabilities to bring subscription services into the ecosystem, Pi is promoting use cases that directly correspond to real products and blockchain-based ongoing practical services (such as e-commerce, streaming, online tools, etc.).

This builds on recent node and protocol upgrades that prepare the blockchain for smart contract functionality, while the Pi Testnet RPC server release provides developers with a practical way to interact with blockchain data and test application workflows.

To open the subscription smart contract for technical review and community feedback, Pi has released the second Pi Comment Request (PiRC2).

PiRC2 gives developers and other evaluators the opportunity to carefully examine the design, identify vulnerabilities or edge cases (if any), and suggest improvements. It also provides a way for the ecosystem to evaluate the contract before mainnet deployment.

The smart contract itself is also undergoing external audit services review.

How Subscription Smart Contracts Work
Subscription smart contracts offer developers and businesses a way to build recurring service models within applications or local commerce, while handling payments via blockchain and maintaining control over funds for subscribers.

The key design point is that subscribers can approve the contract’s required budget without needing to re-sign each billing event. This approval can also be limited to a specific billing period, such as monthly charges, with a maximum duration of one year. Meanwhile, the approved funds remain in the wallet until the actual deduction is processed. As long as the wallet has sufficient balance at the time of deduction, the subscription remains valid without locking the entire budget upfront.

This allows contracts to support periodic payments without relinquishing wallet-level control inherent to blockchain systems, nor sending the entire budget to the contract.

Technological Innovation
Subscriptions are not new in blockchain, but they often involve trade-offs. For example, other blockchains *have proposed standards for recurring payments, but these methods typically involve off-chain coordination, repeated authorizations, or additional account infrastructure.

Pi’s model takes a different approach. Its design aims to enable subscriptions to operate normally without re-signing at each billing event, while still keeping the approved funds in the subscriber’s wallet before actual billing. This is a meaningful design choice in Web3, because periodic payments are often harder to implement cleanly, which can add friction, require pre-funding, or necessitate extra infrastructure.

Developers: Test Subscriptions and Evaluate PiRC2
The subscription feature provides an early preview for developing and testing Pi smart contracts. This phase focuses on technical review, vulnerability detection, and experiments at the command line and backend levels.

With the release of PiRC2, developers are encouraged to review the subscription contract design, identify vulnerabilities or edge cases, and suggest improvements.

*Recurring subscriptions have also been explored in other blockchain ecosystems, but they tend to be more complex. For example, on Ethereum, EIP-1337 proposes “subscriptions on the blockchain,” using off-chain stored and submitted signed subscription data for execution. ERC-4337 account abstraction explicitly relies on higher-layer smart account infrastructure.*