The native token of the Pi Network ecosystem continues with its highly volatile price movements, this time in the right direction, gaining over 7% of value daily to trade above $0.19.
This substantial uptick following a multi-day correction that pushed it south by nearly 50% comes as the Core Team prepares for the next big update.
PI Rebounds Strong
Even though March is just over halfway over, it’s been a highly volatile and eventful month for PI. The token exploded from under $0.175 to over $0.23 by March 9, perhaps driven by the major protocol updates, which we will touch upon later in the article.
The bigger hype news came from Kraken, though, as the company said a few days later that it would list PI for trading on March 13. The token responded with an immediate price surge that drove it north to a five-month peak of almost $0.30. Once it indeed became live for trading on the veteran US exchange, though, the landscape changed instantly for the worse.
In what became a classic ‘buy-the-rumor, sell-the-news’ event, PI plummeted by double digits daily, and kept correcting to $0.175 market earlier this week. This meant that it had slashed almost 50% of its value in 72 hours.
However, it bounced yesterday to over $0.18 and continued today, with another surge that has driven it to over $0.19. Current data from PiScan shows that the average number of tokens to be unlocked in the next month is below 5.5 million. Aside from today (March 20), when 16 million coins are scheduled to be released, the rest of the month should be less eventful in this manner.
Pi Token Unlock Schedule. Source: PiScan
Another One Coming Up
As hinted above, some of the key updates introduced by the team coincided with or preceded the price increases. The first major one came on February 20, when the protocol version was upgraded to 19.6. Version 19.9 followed on March 4, while the highly anticipated v20.2 was successfully completed before March 14 (known in the Pi Network community as Pi Day).
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The reason why it was arguably the most hyped is that it laid out the foundations for enabling smart contract capabilities, which will roll out gradually as the team wants to prioritize categories that align with utility-based product innovation and operations.
The next protocol update in Pi Network’s road ahead is v21. Although the details provided by the team are scarce at the moment, they still urged node operators to ensure their systems are up to date.
The Pi Mainnet has successfully upgraded to Protocol 20, laying the foundation for supporting smart contracts. Node operators, please ensure your systems are up to date and stay tuned for instructions regarding the upcoming v21 upgrade.
— Pi Network (@PiCoreTeam) March 19, 2026
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