As Pi Day is just one day away, panic is growing among Pi Network users, known as Pioneers. Many fear they could lose their Pi coins due to issues with the Know Your Customer (KYC) verification process. With the final deadline set for March 14, 2025, frustration is at an all-time high as users struggle to get verified in time.
Users Face KYC Challenges
Tap to Earn Pi Network has recently announced that any user who does not complete KYC and transfer their balance to the Mainnet by 8:00 AM UTC on March 14, 2025, will lose most of their mobile balance. The team says this is necessary to keep the network clean from unverified accounts.
However, many users say they have tried to complete KYC multiple times without success. Crypto enthusiast Rod Thompson has called this one of the biggest issues in crypto, claiming he could lose over 10,000 Pi coins because some of his referrals have not completed KYC.
He also pointed out that Pi Network profits from ads shown during daily mining, making the situation feel unfair.
Others have also shared their frustration, saying their KYC applications have been pending for over two years. Some users have no option to reapply, leaving them in limbo and raising concerns about the fairness of the system.
Concerns Over Rewards and Balance Transfers
Aside from KYC problems, users have reported balance inconsistencies. Some claim their unverified balance continues to grow, but their transferable balance remains small. This has led to doubts about the transparency of the platform.
Another complaint is unfair reward distribution. Some long-term miners with referrals have received fewer Pi coins than others who mine irregularly, causing frustration.
Additionally, many users struggle to move their Pi coins to the Mainnet, even after completing all the steps. Due to long lock-up periods, some have even started selling their accounts on unofficial platforms, raising concerns about the project’s credibility.
Pi Coin Price Rises Despite Frustration
Despite these issues, Pi Coin’s price has surged by nearly 7% in the past 24 hours as investors prepare for Pi Day. Some analysts believe this rise is driven by speculation about potential announcements on March 14.
However, with the final KYC deadline approaching and many users still unable to verify their accounts, the future of Pi Network remains uncertain.
The metrics used to measure outcomes can be misleading when evaluating blockchain performance. As more blockchain networks emerge, the public needs clear, efficiency-focused metrics, rather than exaggerated claims, to differentiate between them.
In a conversation with BeInCrypto, Taraxa Co-Founder Steven Pu explained that it’s becoming increasingly difficult to compare blockchain performance accurately because many reported metrics rely on overly optimistic assumptions rather than evidence-based results. To combat this wave of misrepresentation, Pu proposes a new metric, which he calls TPS/$.
Why Does the Industry Lack Reliable Benchmarks?
The need for clear differentiation is growing with the increasing number of Layer-1 blockchain networks. As various developers promote the speed and efficiency of their blockchains, relying on metrics that distinguish their performance becomes indispensable.
However, the industry still lacks reliable benchmarks for real-world efficiency, instead relying on sporadic sentimental waves of hype-driven popularity. According to Pu, misleading performance figures currently saturate the market, obscuring true capabilities.
“It’s easy for opportunists to take advantage by driving up over-simplified and exaggerated narratives to profit themselves. Every single conceivable technical concept and metric has at one time or another been used to hype up many projects that don’t really deserve them: TPS, finality latency, modularity, network node count, execution speed, parallelization, bandwidth utilization, EVM-compatibility, EVM-incompatibility, etc.,” Pu told BeInCrypto.
Pu focused on how some projects exploit TPS metrics, using them as marketing tactics to make blockchain performance sound more appealing than it might be under real-world conditions.
Examining the Misleading Nature of TPS
Transactions per second, more commonly known as TPS, is a metric that refers to the average or sustained number of transactions that a blockchain network can process and finalize per second under normal operating conditions.
However, it often misleadingly hypes projects, offering a skewed view of overall performance.
“Decentralized networks are complex systems that need to be considered as a whole, and in the context of their use cases. But the market has this horrible habit of over-simplifying and over-selling one specific metric or aspect of a project, while ignoring the whole. Perhaps a highly centralized, high-TPS network does have its uses in the right scenarios with specific trust models, but the market really has no appetite for such nuanced descriptions,” Pu explained.
Pu indicates that blockchain projects with extreme claims on single metrics like TPS may have compromised decentralization, security, and accuracy.
“Take TPS, for example. This one metric masks numerous other aspects of the network, for example, how was the TPS achieved? What was sacrificed in the process? If I have 1 node, running a WASM JIT VM, call that a network, that gets you a few hundred thousand TPS right off the bat. I then make 1000 copies of that machine and call it sharding, now you start to get into the hundreds of millions of ‘TPS’. Add in unrealistic assumptions such as non-conflict, and you assume you can parallelize all transactions, then you can get “TPS” into the billions. It’s not that TPS is a bad metric, you just can’t look at any metric in isolation because there’s so much hidden information behind the numbers,” he added.
The Taraxa Co-founder revealed the extent of these inflated metrics in a recent report.
The Significant Discrepancy Between Theoretical and Real-World TPS
Pu sought to prove his point by determining the difference between the maximum historical TPS realized on a blockchain’s mainnet and the maximum theoretical TPS.
Of the 22 permissionless and single-shard networks observed, Pu found that, on average, there was a 20-fold gap between theory and reality. In other words, the theoretical metric was 20 times higher than the maximum observed mainnet TPS.
Taraxa Co-founder finds 20x difference between the Theoretical TPS and the Max Observed Mainnet TPS. Source: Taraxa.
“Metric overestimations (such as in the case of TPS) are a response to the highly speculative and narrative-driven crypto market. Everyone wants to position their project and technologies in the best possible light, so they come up with theoretical estimates, or conduct tests with wildly unrealistic assumptions, to arrive at inflated metrics. It’s dishonest advertising. Nothing more, nothing less,” Pu told BeInCrypto.
Looking to counter these exaggerated metrics, Pu developed his own performance measure.
Introducing TPS/$: A More Balanced Metric?
Pu and his team developed the following: TPS realized on mainnet / monthly $ cost of a single validator node, or TPS/$ for short, to fulfill the need for better performance metrics.
This metric assesses performance based on verifiable TPS achieved on a network’s live mainnet while also considering hardware efficiency.
The significant 20-fold gap between theoretical and actual throughput convinced Pu to exclude metrics based solely on assumptions or lab conditions. He also aimed to illustrate how some blockchain projects inflate performance metrics by relying on costly infrastructure.
“Published network performance claims are often inflated by extremely expensive hardware. This is especially true for networks with highly centralized consensus mechanisms, where the throughput bottleneck shifts away from networking latency and into single-machine hardware performance. Requiring extremely expensive hardware for validators not only betrays a centralized consensus algorithm and inefficient engineering, it also prevents the vast majority of the world from potentially participating in consensus by pricing them out,” Pu explained.
Pu’s team located each network’s minimum validator hardware requirements to determine the cost per validator node. They later estimated their monthly cost, paying particular attention to their relative sizing when used to compute the TPS per dollar ratios.
“So the TPS/$ metric tries to correct two of the perhaps most egregious categories of misinformation, by forcing the TPS performance to be on mainnet, and revealing the inherent tradeoffs of extremely expensive hardware,” Pu added.
Pu stressed considering two simple, identifiable characteristics: whether a network is permissionless and single-sharded.
Permissioned vs. Permissionless Networks: Which Fosters Decentralization?
A blockchain’s degree of security can be unveiled by whether it operates under a permissioned or permissionless network.
Permissioned blockchains refer to closed networks where access and participation are restricted to a predefined group of users, requiring permission from a central authority or trusted group to join. In permissionless blockchains, anyone is allowed to participate.
According to Pu, the former model is at odds with the philosophy of decentralization.
“A permissioned network, where network validation membership is controlled by a single entity, or if there is just a single entity (every Layer-2s), is another excellent metric. This tells you whether or not the network is indeed decentralized. A hallmark of decentralization is its ability to bridge trust gaps. Take decentralization away, then the network is nothing more than a cloud service,” Pu told BeInCrypto.
Attention to these metrics will prove vital over time, as networks with centralized authorities tend to be more vulnerable to certain weaknesses.
“In the long term, what we really need is a battery of standardized attack vectors for L1 infrastructure that can help to reveal weaknesses and tradeoffs for any given architectural design. Much of the problems in today’s mainstream L1 are that they make unreasonable sacrifices in security and decentralization. These characteristics are invisible and extremely hard to observe, until a disaster strikes. My hope is that as the industry matures, such a battery of tests will begin to organically emerge into an industry-wide standard,” Pu added.
Meanwhile, understanding whether a network employs state-sharding versus maintaining a single, sharded state reveals how unified its data management is.
State-Sharding vs. Single-State: Understanding Data Unity
In blockchain performance, latency refers to the time delay between submitting a transaction to the network, confirming it, and including it in a block on the blockchain. It measures how long it takes for a transaction to be processed and become a permanent part of the distributed ledger.
Identifying whether a network employs state-sharding or a single-sharded state can reveal much about its latency efficiency.
State-sharded networks divide the blockchain’s data into multiple independent parts called shards. Each shard operates somewhat independently and doesn’t have direct, real-time access to the complete state of the entire network.
By contrast, a non-state-sharded network has a single, shared state across the entire network. All nodes can access and process the same complete data set in this case.
Pu noted that state-sharded networks aim to increase storage and transaction capacity. However, they often face longer finality latencies due to a need to process transactions across multiple independent shards.
He added that many projects adopting a sharding approach inflate throughput by simply replicating their network rather than building a truly integrated and scalable architecture.
“A state-sharded network that doesn’t share state, is simply making unconnected copies of a network. If I take a L1 network and just make 1000 copies of it running independently, it’s clearly dishonest to claim that I can add up all the throughput across the copies together and represent it as a single network. There are architectures that actually synchronize the states as well as shuffle the validators across shards, but more often than not, projects making outlandish claims on throughput are just making independent copies,” Pu said.
Based on his research into the efficiency of blockchain metrics, Pu highlighted the need for fundamental shifts in how projects are evaluated, funded, and ultimately succeed.
What Fundamental Shifts Does Blockchain Evaluation Need?
Pu’s insights present a notable alternative in a Layer-1 blockchain space where misleading performance metrics increasingly compete for attention. Reliable and effective benchmarks are essential to counter these false representations.
“You only know what you can measure, and right now in crypto, the numbers look more like hype-narratives than objective measurements. Having standardized, transparent measurements allows simple comparisons across product options so developers and users understand what it is they’re using, and what tradeoffs they’re making. This is a hallmark of any mature industry, and we still have a long way to go in crypto,” Pu concluded.
Adopting standardized and transparent benchmarks will foster informed decision-making and drive genuine progress beyond merely promotional claims as the industry matures.
XRP has gained roughly 8% over the past seven days. Earlier in the week, the world’s first XRP ETF was launched in Brazil. Despite the positive momentum, XRP remains caught in a tight trading range, with key resistance and support levels still defining its short-term outlook.
Recent indicators, including the RSI rebound and a slightly bullish Ichimoku Cloud structure, point to cautious optimism.
XRP’s RSI Rebounds: What It Means for the Price Action
XRP’s Relative Strength Index (RSI) currently stands at 58.36, rising from 47.34 earlier today but still down from 77.7 reached four days ago.
This movement shows a recovery from recent lower levels, although it remains below the overbought conditions seen earlier in the week.
The recent RSI trend suggests that while bullish momentum has resurfaced in the short term, XRP has not yet regained the same strength it displayed just a few days ago, signaling a more cautious sentiment among traders.
RSI, or Relative Strength Index, is a momentum oscillator that measures the speed and change of price movements on a scale from 0 to 100.
Typically, an RSI above 70 signals that an asset is overbought and might be due for a correction, while an RSI below 30 indicates it is oversold and could be poised for a rebound.
With XRP’s RSI now at 58.36, the asset is in neutral-to-slightly-bullish territory, suggesting there is still room for further gains without immediately triggering overbought conditions.
If buying pressure continues, this could set the stage for a gradual upward move, though a lack of strong momentum could also result in range-bound trading.
XRP Hovers Above Cloud as Momentum Stalls
The Ichimoku Cloud for XRP presents a bullish structure, with the price just slightly above the cloud.
The future cloud remains green, indicating that bullish conditions are still projected ahead. However, the proximity of the lines to the price suggests some hesitation or consolidation in the short term.
The Ichimoku system fully views trend direction, momentum, and support/resistance areas.
When the price is above the cloud with a green cloud ahead, it usually signals a favorable trend, but when the Tenkan-sen and Kijun-sen hug the price closely, it can indicate a lack of clear conviction from either buyers or sellers.
In XRP’s case, the bullish trend remains intact, but the tight positioning of the lines points to a fragile uptrend where a sharp move in either direction could easily shift the structure.
XRP Outlook: Will Bulls or Bears Take Control?
XRP price is trading within a tight range, caught between a resistance level of $2.30 and a support level of $2.11.
This sideways movement comes just two days after the launch of the world’s first XRP ETF in Brazil, a development that could eventually influence market sentiment.
If XRP falls and loses the $2.11 support, it could lead to a decline toward the next support level, $2.04.
Should bearish momentum intensify further, a deeper retracement could see XRP test lower levels at $1.96, making it crucial for buyers to defend the current support zone.
Conversely, if XRP tests and breaks above the $2.30 resistance with strong bullish momentum, the next upside target would be around $2.50.
Continued strength could push the price toward $2.59, potentially extending to $2.64 if buyers maintain control.
India decided to introduce retaliatory measures against Trump tariffs after the US President decided to raise duties on steel and aluminum imports. The announcement comes just as US-China trade deal sees positive development, raising doubts over America’s China plus one policy.
Trump Tariffs: India Doesn’t Give Up to Donald Trump’s Whims
US President Donald Trump has dialed back significantly on the U.S.-China trade war after raising 145% in April. On the other hand, the progress on US-India trade talks seems to hit a barrier as India plans to put tariffs on several products as a retaliatory response to Trump tariffs on US steel and aluminum imports.
In March, the United States introduced a 25% tariff on steel and aluminum imports. As the world’s second-largest crude steel producer, India informed the WTO that these tariffs would impact $7.6 billion worth of Indian exports to the US.
The US-India trade war tensions escalated at a time when the two countries were discussing a Bilateral Trade Agreement (BTA), which is likely to conclude on July 8. This will be just before the 25% Trump tariffs kick in on Indian imports into the US, considering the 90-day grace period.
With President Trump announcing agreements with the UK and China over the past week, India, a key economic partner, waits on the sidelines. On Monday, Trump declared a “total reset” in the US-China Trade deal following the public release of the trade deal details between the two nations.
This could potentially impact India’s competitive edge in attracting global firms willing to relocate from China. This dialing back of Trump tariffs on China undermines the “China Plus One” strategy.
Crypto Market Upside Continues
Amid these broader macro developments, crypto market continues its upside, with Bitcoin price bouncing back 2% to $103,500, after dropping back on Tuesday. Altcoins are staging even greater strength with Ethereum (ETH) leading the pack with 9% gains. Other top altcoins like XRP, Solana (SOL), Dogecoin (DOGE), and Cardano (ADA) have gained 4-10% today.
