Crypto Project Pi Network, Created by Stanford Graduates, Hits 500,000 Users in 6 Months

Stanford Graduates created a smartphone-focused cryptocurrency network that recently hit the 500,000 user mark.

According to the Stanford Daily, the crypto network dubbed the Pi Network was launched earlier this year in March. Since then, the network has been able to amass more than half a million users stated the report released on September 16th.

Social Security Circles

The cryptocurrency network was founded and launched by four students: a visiting student researcher, an anthropologist, a business major, and two computer science students. The project was created with the goal of providing disintermediated finance students to a larger audience.

The main focus of the Pi Network is accessibility. It seeks to provide its users with an innovative validation mechanism based on security circles and a smartphone oriented user-interface.

Instead of using a compute-intensive mechanism to mining, the ledger being used by the Pi Network has been secured using a system where the users get to vouch for each other’s trustworthiness.

This makes the whole network lighter, and thus accessible using a free smartphone-based application. It is an application that does not require a lot of processing power, which means that it also gets to minimize the amount of energy consumed when mining.

According to the Stanford Daily report, the application works in the following manner: the members already on the Pi network get to vouch for others as being trustworthy. This, in turn, helps to create an interlocking security circle that can be used to generate global trust graphs.

The graphs are crucial in communicating information on which users can be trusted and relied upon to record transactions. It is an approach that makes it possible for users to make a direct contribution to crypto mining from their handsets. It is a fete achieved through the leveraging of social connections.

Resources For The Project

Stanford University did not make any direct contributions toward the development and launch of this project. The four founders involved in the project did, however, note that they learned a lot from the interactions they had with Bioengineering professor Jan Liphardt and Computer Science Professors, David Mazieres and Michael Bernstein.