Originally published at mrnasdog.com/research/pi/inflation by MrNasDog.

This is the long supply read. For the signal, the price drivers and the questions people ask about Pi Network, see mrnasdog.com/research/pi.

PI Inflation Analysis · October 2026 · Supply growing · projected to keep growing

PI supply is growing fast. In the 90 days to Oct 15 2026, Pi Network moved 301.27M PI of mobile-mining rewards onto its mainnet, and wallets of the Core Team, the Pi Foundation and the liquidity reserve sent another 110.76M PI to exchanges. Against that, the network’s fee burn removed only 2.42M PI. Net, the counted supply of 11.24B PI grew +3.64%, and we project +2.93% for the next 90 days. All 100B PI already exist; the question is only how fast they reach the market.

The verdict, in one paragraph

The MrNasDog Pressure Framework reads PI at +3.64% net new supply over the last 90 days and +2.93% for the next 90. The inflation monitor reads +3.03%, a gap of 0.61 percentage points. That is above our 0.5-point line, so we walked every source again, and the walk closed it: the monitor’s window starts six days earlier and catches one more 50M mining payout (about +0.35 points), and it cannot see the 110.76M PI that team wallets sent to exchanges (about −0.99 points), because the Pi Network supply count includes only mining rewards moved to mainnet. No warning chip is needed. PI is a pre-minted coin whose float grows by release, not by printing: inflationary by unlock, with the team’s wallets as a second tap.

Sell pressure: where new PI comes from

Mining rewards moving to mainnet: 301.27M PI. Pioneers mine PI in the phone app for years before the coins are real. A balance only counts once the pioneer passes KYC and the Pi Core Team pays it out on mainnet, from a 65B mining pool through a payout wallet. In this window the payouts came in steps of about 50M PI until Sep 22 2026, and almost nothing has moved since. The pace has slowed sharply: the 90 days before brought 769.6M PI. The mining pool still holds 48.65B PI, and the payout wallet holds 354.2M PI ready to send. The Pi Network KYC post of Sep 17 2026 said 417,000 pioneers were cleared from a duplicate-account check and 497,000 more would be unblocked, so the next payouts could be larger than this window’s.

Vesting unlocks: 0. The Core Team (20B), Foundation (10B) and liquidity (5B) shares unlock on paper at the same pace as the mining payouts, about 162M PI this window, but there is no dated vesting calendar. Pioneer lockups that end every day are coins already in the counted supply, so they add nothing. What really left the team wallets is booked in the next row.

Foundation and unscheduled unlocks: 110.76M PI. We read all 9,999 Core Team wallets and the Foundation and liquidity wallets on the Pi mainnet and followed every payment two steps to two busy exchange wallets. A liquidity wallet that received 50M PI on Sep 3 2026 delivered 78.91M PI to exchanges in the window and is now empty. Core Team wallets released batches on Aug 6 and Sep 3 2026 that reached exchanges as 21.05M PI, and a Foundation wallet sent 10.80M PI in batches on Aug 6, Sep 3 and Sep 30. The team and Foundation batches repeat about every four weeks, so the next 90 days carry 31.05M PI; the liquidity tranches came 11 months apart, so we book none next.

Long-term locked or bankruptcy: 0. No court estate, trustee or bankruptcy release holds PI.

Buy pressure: where new PI goes

Programmatic buyback: 0. Pi Network does not buy PI back. Fees for Pi App Studio and other apps are not used to take coins off the market.

Protocol fee burn: 2.42M PI. Pi runs on a fork of the Stellar code, so every transaction fee leaves the payer’s wallet and sits in the ledger’s fee pool, which no wallet can spend. The pool grew from 9.26M to 11.69M PI in the window, about 26,900 PI a day, the same pace as the 90 days before. That is 0.02% of the counted supply, far too small to offset the payouts.

Foundation buy: 0. No Foundation or team wallet bought PI back in the window. New long-term lock: 0. Pioneers keep locking PI for weeks to three years, but locked migrated coins are already counted, so a new lockup takes nothing out of the float.

Foundation and overhang

The overhang is the largest of any coin we track, because most PI has never been counted. The mining pool holds 48.65B PI still owed to pioneers who have not finished KYC or migration. The Core Team’s 9,999 wallets hold 17.77B PI; 8,863 of them have never moved, while 135 have been drawn down by 10M to 30M PI a month since early 2025. The Pi Foundation’s main wallet holds 9.50B PI and has not moved since Oct 2025; its sub-wallets are the ones paying out. The liquidity wallet holds 4.00B PI, still since May 2026, after its sub-wallet funded this window’s 78.91M. A 4.67B PI reserve split from the mining pool in Dec 2024 has not moved since Oct 2025, and the payout wallet holds 354.2M PI. We read all of these on the Pi mainnet at every rebuild. If any of these balances falls between refreshes and the coins reach an exchange, the outflow enters Sell #3 at the next refresh.

How PI compares to other pre-minted Layer 1 chains

PI is closest in design to Stellar (XLM), whose code it forked. Both minted their whole supply at the start, both send fees into a fee pool that nobody can spend, and both grow the float only as the founding organisation releases coins. The difference is scale and pace: the Stellar Development Foundation burned half of its supply in 2019, while the Pi Core Team still controls most of the 100B PI and releases it to users and markets month by month.

Against XRP, the comparison is about the release rule. Ripple’s escrow releases a fixed amount on a fixed day each month and much of it goes back into escrow, so the schedule is public. PI has no such calendar: mining payouts depend on how fast pioneers pass KYC, and team sales show up only on-chain. Against mined chains such as Bitcoin, there is no block reward at all; the “mining” happened in the app years ago, and what looks like new supply is old supply being handed over. That is why a fee burn of 0.02% barely registers next to the release flow.

What to watch in the next 90 days

Mining payouts restarting. The payout wallet has been still since Sep 22 2026; a new 500M PI top-up from the mining pool, like the one on Sep 8 2026, would signal the next round of migration.

The 497,000 fast-track pioneers. On Oct 15 2026 the Pi sponsor wallet began sending small amounts of PI for gas to many wallets, which may be the fix promised on Sep 17 2026 so these pioneers can claim their balances.

Team and Foundation batches around late Oct, late Nov and late Dec 2026. They have fired about every four weeks; a larger batch, or a new 50M liquidity tranche, would push the next-90-day number up.

Protocol 28 on Oct 16 2026. The mainnet upgrade changes how nodes agree on blocks and how smart contracts are upgraded; it does not change supply or fees.

Summary

PI is a pre-minted coin whose counted supply grows as the Pi Core Team pays out mobile-mining rewards and as team, Foundation and liquidity wallets send coins to exchanges: 301.27M plus 110.76M PI in the last 90 days, against a 2.42M PI fee burn, for +3.64% net and +2.93% projected next. The main risk is the size of what is still held back: 48.65B PI in the mining pool and more than 31B PI in team, Foundation and liquidity wallets. There is no cap on the pace of release other than the team’s own choices, so PI supply will keep growing for years.

MrNasDog Pressure Framework analysis of PI, Metric 1 — Inflation. Data + explanation only. Not financial advice. Checked Oct 15 2026.

Original: https://mrnasdog.com/research/pi/inflation · Data + explanation only. Not financial advice.