A Pi coin IOU is not Pi coin. It is a promise from an exchange or platform that you will get Pi, or its value, later. Before the Open Network opened on 20 Feb 2025, real PI could not leave Pi’s closed system, so a handful of platforms sold IOU contracts that tracked the expected token. Now that PI trades on mainnet, the safest default is to treat any asset labeled “Pi IOU” as a claim on a company, not as coins you own.
That distinction sounds pedantic until money is involved. This page explains where IOUs came from, why their prices and PI’s real price are different numbers, what the sources can and can’t tell us about IOU markets today, and a checklist for spotting whether you are being sold the real thing.
IOU in plain words
Think of a coat-check ticket. You hand over a coat, you get a numbered slip. The slip isn’t the coat. If the cloakroom burns down, the slip is paper. If the cloakroom is honest and still standing, you swap the slip for the coat. The slip can even be sold on to someone else at a price that depends on how much they trust the cloakroom.
A crypto IOU is the same thing. The token you hold is a database entry on the platform that says “this account is owed X Pi”. Nothing sits on the Pi blockchain for you. The platform is the counterparty, so your risk is the platform’s solvency, its honesty and its willingness to honour the claim when the real token is available. There is no guarantee of 1:1 settlement unless the platform’s terms say so, and in many cases they didn’t say much.
That’s the core point and it never changes: with an IOU, you own a contract. With PI on the mainnet, you own coins (in your wallet) or a balance (on an exchange), and you can check where they sit.
How the Pi IOU phase worked
Pi’s enclosed network ran behind a firewall for years. Pioneers accumulated balances in the app, but those balances couldn’t be traded. Demand for “Pi” existed anyway, so third-party platforms offered IOU markets: a way to buy or sell exposure to the token before it existed outside Pi’s network.
Two examples we could verify from official notices. HTX opened a PI spot listing on 29 Dec 2022 at 09:00 UTC, which was an IOU market in practice, since there was nothing real to settle. MEXC ran a PI pre-market before the February 2025 launch, closed and settled by its own notice. And the Pi Core Team warned users that unofficial listings and IOU trading, the pre-mainnet “Pi IOUs”, were not endorsed (reported by Bitpinas in 2025; we could not open Pi’s own statement).
The reason the whole structure existed is simple. Price discovery has to happen somewhere, and people were willing to pay for a claim even without a delivery date. The reason it worried people is also simple: nobody outside the Core Team knew when, or whether, the tokens would unlock for trading.
Why the IOU price was not the “real” price
An IOU price is what other traders were willing to pay for a claim on a platform. It reflects the expected value of Pi, minus the doubt that the platform will pay out, minus the doubt that the network would actually launch, plus whatever speculative mood the market was in. Three different things were being priced at once.
After 20 Feb 2025, real PI got its own price, determined by supply and demand on venues where the token can be deposited and withdrawn. The two numbers don’t have to match, and they didn’t need to. For a snapshot of the live market, see the Pi coin price page. When someone shows you a big number and says it’s what Pi is “really worth”, ask which instrument it belongs to. The same caution applies to the old “internal value” claims that circulated before launch: they were never a market price.
HTX’s notice about its own conversion is a useful example. It says the old PI market was delisted and holdings were converted to USDT at 1:61.28 at 08:00 UTC on 13 Feb 2025, a week before the Open Network, and that the exchange would list the new token after mainnet. We read this as a settlement of the IOU into stable money at a fixed rate; we have not verified the direction of the ratio, so read the HTX notice yourself. We also couldn’t find an HTX page confirming when, or whether, the new token was relisted.
What happened to IOU markets after mainnet opened
Here the honest answer is: parts are documented and parts are not.
What the sources show: OKX, Bitget, Gate and MEXC began real PI spot trading on 20 Feb 2025, with deposits and withdrawals of mainnet PI enabled in the following days. Kraken followed on 13 Mar 2026. For the dated history, see the listing page and the exchanges comparison. On 7 Oct 2026 CoinGecko listed PI pairs on OKX, Gate, Bitget, MEXC, Kraken and other venues, not IOU markets.
What the sources do not show: whether every platform converted, redeemed or still carries IOU balances. Bybit, for example, has both a “PI” and a “Pi Network [IOU]” price page, but price pages exist for unlisted coins and prove nothing about trading. We found no official statement on how those balances were handled, so we are not going to guess.
One more point we’d flag. Since a 1:1 settlement of every IOU was never promised in any notice we found, “is our IOU worth real Pi?” depends on the platform’s own terms for your specific product, not on Pi Network.
How CEX.IO describes Pi
CEX.IO is a useful case because its pages still use the word. The buy page says that Pi Coin is “currently traded as an IOU”, a placeholder for future Pi Network tokens once the network fully launches. It lists card, SEPA and SWIFT bank transfer, e-wallets and crypto funding, and says nothing about fees, settlement dates or restrictions. A separate page describes a custodial Pi wallet with buy, sell, store and transfer features, again without terms. The wording predates, or at least ignores, the February 2025 launch of the Open Network on Pi’s own site.
So what do we actually know? The pages never mention real PI deposits or withdrawals, and its listing policy and risk warning don’t discuss IOUs. Whether you can move real PI in or out is unverified, and so are the settlement terms and the date CEX.IO first offered the asset. We’d rather say that plainly than guess.
None of this says CEX.IO is a bad company. Its own legal pages list FinCEN MSB registration and state money-transmitter licences for its US entity (NMLS 1804170), an anti-money-laundering registration with the FCA for its UK entity (FRN 1007192, which is not FCA authorisation, and UK customers lack FOS or FSCS protection for most crypto), and a pending MiCA application with Spain’s CNMV. Those are real, checkable credentials. They don’t answer the narrower question of what your Pi balance there can be exchanged for, so read the Pi IOU page and the platform’s terms and risk warning before paying. If you decide to trade there, use the exchanges page to see how it sits next to venues that list PI directly.
Before sending money, answer this in your own words: “If we click withdraw, what leaves this platform, to which network, and with what memo?” If you can’t, you are probably buying a balance on the platform, not PI.
A checklist before you buy any IOU
You can run this in five minutes, and it works for any “pre-token” product, not just Pi.
First, find the exact asset name. Does it say IOU, pre-market, futures, or just “PI”? These are four different instruments. Second, look for the withdrawal instructions: a real PI deposit or withdrawal page names the Pi mainnet network and explains the memo, as Kraken’s support page does. A product that has none is a balance. Third, read the settlement terms: what do you receive, in what ratio, when, and who decides. If the page doesn’t say, that is your answer. Fourth, check who the counterparty is and where it’s regulated, and what protections exist if it fails. A regulatory registration is not a guarantee: the UK’s AML registration for crypto firms, for instance, explicitly gives no deposit protection. Fifth, compare the price to the real PI market. If an IOU trades far above or below the live PI price with no explained reason, that is information about risk, not an opportunity.
Then act on it. If you hold an IOU and want actual PI, ask the platform in writing how and when it will deliver and keep the reply. If the platform can’t or won’t say, treat the balance as illiquid and avoid adding to it. And if you simply want to buy PI, the route that leaves you holding the coin, with withdrawals you can test, is described in how to buy Pi coin.
Scammers love the IOU confusion. Fake “IOU redemption” or “IOU swap” sites that ask for your wallet passphrase, a fee to “unlock” an IOU, or a direct message offering to “buy your Pi IOU for cash” are all red flags. The Core Team has said it will never ask for your password or wallet passphrase. Pi KYC is free.
The short version
PI today is a coin you can move on the Pi mainnet. An IOU is a promise from a platform. The IOU era is documented from the exchange side (HTX’s 2022 listing and 2025 conversion, MEXC’s pre-market), but how every remaining IOU balance was handled is not, and CEX.IO’s current “Pi IOU” wording leaves the key terms unstated. That’s not a verdict. It’s a reason to read before you buy. For the bigger picture of what Pi is and where it trades, start with the exchanges page and the listing timeline.
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