The two co-founders of Pi Network will speak this week at Consensus Miami 2026, one of the largest annual conferences in the cryptocurrency industry, as the network’s technology roadmap is advancing at its fastest pace yet.
Dr. Fan Chengdiao will deliver a talk titled "The Practical Convergence of Web3, Artificial Intelligence, and Blockchain" on Wednesday, May 6, on the Fusion Stage. Nicholas Kokkalis will participate in a panel discussion on Thursday, May 7, titled "How to Prove You're Human in the Age of AI Without Revealing Personal Information."
Both meetings were four days ahead of the scheduled activation of Pi’s smart contract upgrade, Protocol 23, on May 11.
Van's Forum: Tokens and Sustainable Models
Fan's speech expects this article to explore how crypto projects can build lasting practical value rather than merely pursuing short-term speculation. Her central argument is that artificial intelligence is changing the competitive landscape of digital product development, giving an advantage to projects with verified users and genuine engagement, rather than those focused solely on development speed.
Pi Network has 16.5 million migrated users and over 17.7 million KYC-verified accounts across more than 200 countries. Fan is expected to use this user base as a data point to broadly explore what constitutes true user adoption in the current market environment.
The network released the subscription smart contract on the testnet on April 17, enabling on-chain recurring billing. Fan is expected to use this as an example to illustrate that the infrastructure was designed to support real commercial activities, not speculative purposes.
Kokkalis's speech: Online Human Identity
As AI-generated profiles rapidly proliferate online, Kokkalis explores an increasingly urgent issue. His team investigates how blockchain-based authentication can distinguish between real and virtual users without requiring users to disclose personal data.
Pi's KYC system has processed over 526 million verifications through more than one million human verifiers. Kokkalis is expected to outline plans to open this verification infrastructure to other projects via API, extending its application beyond Pi’s own ecosystem.
Technical background
The release of the consensus mechanism coincides with Pi's most active development period. Protocol 22 was activated on April 27. Protocol 23 introduced smart contracts and real-world asset tokenization on May 11. Subsequent upgrades are planned through June, aiming to achieve optimization and scalability ahead of the milestone event on June 28.
The Pi node network, comprising over 350,000 operators, has successfully completed AI image recognition tasks in a proof of concept, a development mentioned by the team in discussions about distributed computing infrastructure.
Market position
Pi is currently trading at approximately $0.18, with a market capitalization of around $1.86 billion. By market cap, this token holds the majority share in the mobile mining category. Whether the consensus meeting and the activation of Protocol 23 will have any substantial impact on the price will depend on how institutional and retail investors respond to the network’s technological advancements in the coming days.