What is the Pi Network (PI) inflation rate?

+16.43% a year, and +4.05% in the next 90 days. That is new PI minus what is burned or bought back, checked Oct 4 2026.

Is PI inflationary or deflationary?

Inflationary: PI's supply is growing, about +16.43% a year.

Where does new PI supply come from?

Mined PI paid out to Pioneers (349.7M in 90 days) plus team, Foundation and liquidity wallets selling to exchanges (103.9M).

MrNasdog Pressure Framework · Inflation Analysis

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

Pi Network (PI) supply is growing fast: in the 90 days to Oct 4 2026, Pioneers received 349.7M PI of mined coins through mainnet migration, and Core Team, Pi Foundation and liquidity wallets sent 103.9M PI to exchanges. Nothing came back out, so PI supply rose about +4.03%, against +3.22% on our monitor. All 100B PI were created at genesis; inflation here means pre-made coins reaching holders, and only 11.24B of them count as circulating today.

The verdict, in one paragraph

Over the last 90 days PI's net supply change was +4.03%, and the next 90 days project about the same. Our inflation monitor read +3.22% for its own 90-day window, a gap of 0.82 percentage points. The gap has a clear cause and no warning chip ships: the official circulating figure counts only migrated mining rewards, so the 103.9M PI that team, Foundation and liquidity wallets sent to exchanges can never show up in it, while the migration part alone (+3.11%) sits close to the monitor. Pi Network is a pre-minted chain releasing its float in batches, with no burn and no buyback to slow it.

Sell pressure: where new PI comes from

Mainnet migration is the largest source: 349.7M PI in 90 days. Pioneers mine PI in the app; after identity checks the Core Team pays those balances out on chain from a 65B mining-reward pool, through a payout account that sends each Pioneer a claimable balance. Every migrated coin joins the circulating count the moment it is paid, even if the Pioneer then locks it. Migration runs in batches, and the last batch went out on Sep 18 2026, just as Pi announced fixes that should unblock about 914,000 more Pioneers.

Vesting unlocks book zero. The steady stream of PI Pi's well-known daily "unlocks"quot;unlocksPi's well-known daily "unlocks"quot; people track are Pioneers' own lockups ending. Locked PI already counts as circulating, so a lockup ending moves nothing into the count; locked balances fell from 6.22B in June to 6.11B on Oct 4 2026.

Team, Foundation and liquidity wallets sent 103.9M PI to exchanges. The 5B liquidity fund drips coins through a hot wallet into an exchange account every few minutes: 69.3M PI in the window, refilled with 50M on Sep 3 2026. The Core Team allocation, split at genesis into 10,000 accounts of 2M PI, paid 41.5M PI into personal pass-through wallets this window, and 24.6M PI of that reached exchanges. The Pi Foundation reserve sold 10.0M PI through one relay wallet in monthly steps on Aug 6, Sep 3 and Sep 30 2026.

Long-term locked or bankruptcy: zero. No court estate, trustee or long lock holds PI.

Buy pressure: where new PI goes

Programmatic buyback: zero. Pi runs no buyback. One large anonymous wallet has kept pulling PI off exchanges for a year, but nobody has tied it to the project, so it is ordinary demand, not a supply row.

Protocol fee burn: zero. Every Pi transaction pays a small fee into the network's fee pool, which grew by 2.33M PIthis window. The pool is not destroyed (the chain's total stays exactly 100B), and it never lowers the circulating count, so it is not booked as a burn.

Foundation buy and new long-term lock: zero. No Foundation purchase was found on chain or announced. Pioneer lockups are real and long, up to three years, but locked PI still counts as circulating, so new lockups take nothing out.

Foundation and overhang

The overhang is most of the supply. The mining-reward pool still holds 48.65B PI, with 4.67B more in a second pool wallet, 354M in the payout account and 68M in the migration operator. The Pi Foundation reserve holds 9.5B PI plus about 451M in five sub-wallets. The liquidity fund holds 4.0B PI plus 872M in its second wallet and 11M in the exchange hot wallet. The Core Team's 10,000 accounts hold 17.77B PI, and their pass-through wallets another 1.95B.

We read every one of these wallets on chain at each rebuild. If any of their balances falls between refreshes and the coins reach exchanges, that outflow enters Sell #3 at the next refresh.

How PI compares to other pre-minted Layer 1s

PI shares its design with other pre-minted chains built on the Stellar code base: the whole supply is created once, there is no block reward, and new float comes only from wallets that hold the reserve. That makes Pi Network the opposite of a mined coin like Bitcoin, where new coins are created by a fixed schedule and nobody holds a reserve.

Compared with uncapped proof-of-stake chains such as Ethereum, PI's supply growth is far faster on the counted float (about 4.03% in 90 days against roughly 0.2% for ETH) but bounded by a hard 100B cap. The pace depends on people, not code: how fast identity checks clear, and how fast the team and Foundation choose to sell.

Many younger tokens release insiders on a public vesting calendar with dated cliffs. Pi publishes no such calendar for its Core Team, Foundation or liquidity allocations, so the only way to see releases is to read the wallets, which is what this page does.

What to watch in the next 90 days

Migration restart: Pi said on Sep 17 2026 that fixes would unblock about 417,000 duplicate-flag cases and 497,000 Fast-Track wallets; a large catch-up batch would push the next 90 days above the trailing rate.

Protocol 28 on Oct 16 2026: the mainnet upgrade deadline for node operators. No supply rule change has been announced with it.

Monthly Foundation and Core Team releases: they landed in the first week of each month (Aug 6, Sep 3, Sep 30 2026); watch early November and early December 2026.

Liquidity fund refill: its exchange hot wallet held 11.1M PI on Oct 4 2026; at the recent pace it needs another refill from the 872M wallet within weeks.

Summary

Pi Network's counted PI supply grew about +4.03% in the 90 days to Oct 4 2026 and is projected to keep growing at about the same pace. The engine is pre-minted coins reaching holders: 349.7M PI of migrated mining rewards plus 103.9M PI sold to exchanges by team, Foundation and liquidity wallets. Nothing takes PI back out, and more than 80B PI still sit in project-controlled wallets with no published release schedule. The hard limit is the 100B PI cap; the real risk is how quickly that reserve is let out.

MrNasdog Pressure Framework analysis of PI, Metric 1 — Inflation. Data + explanation only. Not financial advice. Checked Oct 4 2026.