BYBIT CEO Ben Zhou said on Thursday that his exchange will not indicate the PI network’s PI token, which was controversially released on Thursday, citing a Chinese police warning of 2023 allegedly, the loss of their pensions.
“There are several other reports out there that question the project credit,” Zhou published on X. “Yes, I still think you’re a scam, and no, Bybit doesn’t show scam.”
1. Here is an official police warning about $ Pi From the Chinese police back in 2023, the public warned that it is a scam targeting older people who are leaking their personal data and loss of their pension. There are several other reports out there … https://t.co/gkeu2wzwfo
– Ben Zhou (@benbit) February 20, 2025
The PI network did not respond to Coindesk’s request for comments.
The token went live with the project’s mainnet release on Thursday. Users who “extracted” tokens by clicking on their smartphone screens once a day were finally able to transfer and sell tokens.
However, Zhou was in the middle of a separate number on Friday with his Exchange Bybit, which was hacked by North Korea’s Lazarus group for $ 1.5 billion.
PI -Token debuted on OKX to $ 0.67, rose as high as $ 2 and then fell 65% and is currently about $ 0.69.
One question that raised concerns was a marketing tactic that rewarded users who recruited other users. Each time one user persuaded someone else to sign up using their code, the first person’s “mining” rewards were increased. The idea had some drawing comparisons with the Ponzi scheme in 2017, Bitconnect.
“Pi Network is the biggest ponzi [scheme]“X uses Cryptobeast alleged and posted to their 656k supporters.
The project also allows users to lock their tokens as long as three years. In turn, the increased rewards are promised. The same technique was at the heart of the Hex project, whose founder, Richard Schueler, known online as Richard Heart, is a refugee that the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has sought to judge his investors.
The token has a market capital of $ 4.18 billion based on a circulating supply of $ 6.33 billion. However, its inflationary nature means that the maximum supply is 100 billion, giving a fully diluted value (FDV) to a staggering $ 67 billion, provided it has the current price. At the launch, FDV rose as high as $ 200 billion, almost twice that of Solana.
Some exchanges have been effortless by the concerns raised. OKX, Bitget and Gate have collected a total of $ 620 million in the trading volume for PI trading pair between them, according to CoinMarketcap.
Read more: PI Network’s token debuts at $ 195B value in spite of minimal liquidity
