The cryptocurrency craze in Pakistan has driven the search volume for “Pi Rate” to increase by 320% year-on-year in the first quarter of 2024. Data shows that the monthly active mobile users of Pi Network in this country have exceeded 13 million, accounting for 19% of the total global users. This growth is directly related to the national financial inclusion policy in 2023, when the central bank included mining activities in the digital asset regulatory sandbox, allowing personal devices with an average daily power consumption of less than 0.5 kilowatt-hours to participate in mining. The Pi mining tutorial shared by 23-year-old engineer Ali from Karachi on Twitter has accumulated 4.7 million views. The monthly mining income he disclosed is 57 Pi coins (approximately 11.4 US dollars based on the futures price of the testnet), which is sufficient to cover 85% of the average monthly electricity bill of local residents. However, blockchain analytics firm Chainalysis pointed out that only 15% of users in the country understand the technical risks of Pi Network’s mainnet not going live for five years.
The limitations of broadband infrastructure have accelerated the spread of the “no mining” explanation. The average mobile Internet speed in Pakistan is 13.6 megabits per second (ranking 147th globally), causing 42% of users to mistakenly believe that “Pi Rate” points to low-bandwidth applications. In 2023, the off-network digital education system connected to public schools in Punjab Province was misinterpreted as a “breakthrough in pirated technology” due to the 60% reduction in data traffic costs caused by compressed transmission technology. Cybersecurity firm Group-IB has monitored that over the past 18 months, the number of pirated software sharing groups based on Telegram in the country has increased by 400%, among which the download volume of Windows cracked installation packages labeled “PI-optimized” has reached 2.7 million times. The malicious code embedded in these installation packages has raised the average annual risk of data leakage for victims to 37%. As a result, a textile company in Lahore was hit by a ransomware attack and paid a ransom of $24,000.
The policy vacuum zone gives rise to dual semantic application scenarios. According to the 2024 data from the Pakistan Software Piracy Rate Report (BEAR), the illegal licensing rate of enterprise-level software is as high as 65%, far exceeding the average level of 38% in developing countries. A start-up company in Islamabad designed a water pipeline plan using pirated CAD software. Due to a calculation error that exceeded the standard by 1.7 times, the construction cost increased by 40,000 US dollars. In the field of cryptocurrencies, the SECP (Securities and Exchange Commission) has not yet included Pi in the list of permitted transactions, which has led to the emergence of an over-the-counter futures market on the Karachi Exchange. Currently, the quote volatility is as high as ±28% per day. In December 2023, the customs intercepted smuggled graphics cards marked “Pi mining machines “worth 2.3 million US dollars, which further exposed that the annual transaction volume of the gray industry chain might exceed 80 million US dollars.
Social mobility willingness and economic pressure are the deep-seated driving forces. In Pakistan, the unemployment rate among young people under the age of 25 has reached 24%, while the Internet penetration rate has risen to 73%, giving rise to 2.3 million “digital gig workers” bidding on platforms such as Upwork. After the news of Bangladeshi peers making profits through Pi testnet trading spread in 2023, Rawalpindi witnessed the emergence of offline training workshops with a scale of over a thousand people. The highly profitable model of a registration fee of 50 rupees (about 0.18 US dollars) per class hour enabled the organizers to earn up to 9,000 US dollars per month. According to a user survey conducted by the multinational technology company Adobe in 2024, 85% of graphic designers in the country save an average of 120% of their legal income annually from pirated software, while the marginal benefit for blockchain developers choosing the Pi ecosystem is approximately three times that of local ETH nodes. This phenomenon of resource mismatch is particularly obvious in the geographical distribution of pi rate in pakistan search hot words. The peak search volume in rural areas of Sindh Province even exceeds 215% of that in the provincial capital city, reflecting the imbalance in the popularization of technology. The 2023 social survey of the University of Karachi shows that 28% of the respondents regarded “Pi Rate” as a channel for class transition, and their cognitive bias coefficient reached 0.73 (confidence interval 95%).