With so much interest in the Pi Network, I wanted to do a blog post about the creators, who they are, and what we know about them so far. I did a lot of digging for this so I think a lot of you are going to find this pretty interesting. But for anybody who doesn't really know what the Pi Network is, here's my best explanation.
You can say that the Pi Network is a decentralized cryptocurrency platform that is pretty much a more practical version of Bitcoin. You can think of Pi as being a version of Bitcoin but that's been reimagined for everyday people.
It was invented by a couple of Stanford University graduates and the coolest part about this project is that you can mine from your phone and it doesn't cost you anything. It only takes about 10 seconds each day or if you really want to factor it in, in about an hour each year. This makes a cryptocurrency super accessible to the average person and it's really one of my favorite things about this project.
Right now, there are more than 30 Million people on this platform and the coin is scheduled to be released sometime on March 14, 2022 (Pi Day) or Jun 28, 2022 (Pi2 Day).
The Creators of Pi Network
Can we trust the Pi Network Developers? Who are these people and what do we know about them so far? One thing I can say for sure is that these developers have a pretty good history on the internet. There's actually a lot of information about them and I think a lot of you will learn something new in this blog post.
He attended the University of Crete from 1998 to 2002 and would later go on to get a Master's Degree from the University of Toronto and also another Master's Degree in Management Science and Engineering from Stanford University.
I know this sounds like a lot already but he would later go on again to get a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Stanford and is now doing his postdoc there. Now, his academic accolades sound pretty impressive but how do we know that this is true?
Nowadays, anybody on the internet can lie about who they really are and I think one of the things I love about the Pi Network is that there's a lot of evidence on the internet proving these things to be true. You can see his academic profile on stanford.com and it's going to list exactly what I have told you so far. If you're somebody who needs more proof, we can actually take a look at some of the classes that he teaches, and let's take a look at CS359B.
CS359B is a blockchain application design class that he leads and the goal of this class is really to teach you how to design your own blockchain application. I think this is pretty good news for anybody skeptical of the project because this at least shows that he has the skills or ability to really create an application on the blockchain. It looks like he also has the credentials here to build, let's say a real cryptocurrency. If you want to take a look at some of his classes there's actually a clip of his students' final presentation here. One thing you can take away so far is that Nicolas appears to be who he says he is so far.
This sounds like a lot of information about him already but there's a lot more actually online and I really do think that this is going to give you a better picture of who he really is. You would see that even before the Pi Network, he was involved in a lot of other projects as well. He was the founder of Game Yolo which created casual flash games for social media networks.
Flash games used to be really popular back when I was in college. I hope you guys remember Ken Cannon because that was one of my favorite games back then. Here's a couple of games that he produced back in 2009. This included racing games, puzzle games, and even adventure games. From this, we can see that he's always been entrepreneurial,, and apart from creating his own flash game company, he was also the CTO of Start X.
Start X is a not-for-profit business community that helps startups raise money. You might be familiar with some of the projects that came out of Start X including Lime bike which is a really popular scooter platform around cities in the US; the Opensea.io, one of the best places to buy NFT collectibles and Boosted which is known for the electric skateboards.
One of the coolest things about this project is that Start X is now valued at around 26 billion dollars with almost 600 startups created and, incredibly, Dr. Nicolas Kokkalis had a hand in this project. I think this gives a lot of credibility to him as a person and this leads me to one of his newest projects which is the Pi Network...
When we take a look at his academic research, we can see that he focused on a lot of crowdsourcing and also collective social capital, and another way you can say this is that he wanted to leverage a large group of people to make the world better.
From some of this research, he was able to meet Dr. Chengdiao Fan who would later form the Pi Network with Dr. Kokkalis, and just like Dr. Kokkalis, Dr. Fan also has a Ph.D. from Stanford University.
She holds a Ph.D. in Computational Anthropology. This is actually the first time that I've ever heard this term but it's basically the science of how human behavior patterns change in time and space. I'm guessing she builds a lot of computational models on how a group will behave and this applies a lot to the Pi Network because they're basically trying to get people to buy, exchange, and use Pi coins, and how we use these coins will ultimately decide on the price and whether or not this whole project will succeed.
She plays a pretty big role in expanding the Pi Network both in Asia and also in America. Before the Pi Network, she also founded her own business. She worked as the CEO of Myriadhub Inc. back in 2017. The company was able to receive about a hundred thousand dollars in funding.
She designed a chrome extension to help you email multiple people basically instead of emailing one person at a time you can email 1000 people at once.
This tells me that she has a strong entrepreneurial spirit just like Dr. Kokkalis and one of the more interesting things that I found when I was doing research on her is really another company that she started. Right now, she's listed as a CEO of a company called Social Chain and it looks like to me that this is actually the company behind the Pi Network and I'm really curious to see what happens in the future.
The last founding member of the Pi Network is Vince Mcphillip or the head of Community for the Pi Network. Similar to the other members of the Pi Network he also has a strong academic background. He graduated from Yale University with a Bachelor's Degree in Political Science and just like the other members of this team he also had his own business projects as well.
He started his own wellness program called Wellwyn and although I couldn't really find too much information about the project today, I did see that he worked for a non-profit consulting company. The company is called Bridgespan Group and he likely worked as a management consultant for the company. The goal of Bridgespan Group is to help not-for-profit companies become more efficient. This includes gathering as much data as you can on the company trying to reduce costs and also focusing on areas for that company to improve.
After working at Bridgespan he attended Stanford University for his MBA and at Stanford, he would get more and more interested in cryptocurrency. While attending Stanford, he would start The Stanford Blockchain Collective. This was a group of people who were interested in using cryptocurrency to change the world. This group would eventually grow to about 750 people and today he still sits with Dr. Nicolas Kokkalis to manage the group.
So far, I think I can paint a pretty good picture of what happened. It looks like to me that Dr. Nicolas Kokkalis and Vince Mcphillip met at this group and Dr. Kokkalis and Dr. Fan also met during the research project and since all three of them were interested in using cryptocurrency to change the world, they came together and created Social Chain and under Social Chain, they created the Pi Network.
I think this is a pretty plausible explanation of how the Pi Network started. They all had an interest in cryptocurrency and they all wanted to use it for some sort of good the project seems pretty trustworthy right now especially in the hands of these people. I won't have to say that Vince is no longer with the project. This happened on February 2nd, 2021 and there are not a lot of explanations about this. All we know so far is that it involves some sort of litigation case.
With Vince's departure from the company, Christine Birch was named the new Marketing Head for the Pi Network. She's the founder of the ROYGBIV Collective and Pi Network is her first non-entertainment project.
Christine Birch served as a former Senior Vice President of Creative Advertising for SONY and it looks like her company helped promote films like Spiderman, Jumanji, and even Transformers. I think with her help, she's really going to push this project to the next level. This might include a marketing campaign and also a redesign of the Pi Network app in general. Apart from Birch, there are also a lot of different members working on the project as well.
What I can say so far is that this project looks pretty legit especially because they have the personnel and also expertise to make this thing successful. I'm excited to see what will happen and I'll update you guys whenever I receive new information. Make sure to visit come back to this blog from time to time.
***Related Post: The Pi Network Core Team
