PI is among the few altcoins that has not plunged today.

After successfully implementing several consecutive protocol updates, the Core Team behind the controversial project noted earlier today that the next one is already in the works.

At the same time, the underlying token has posted a minor gain since yesterday. However, its broader performance continues to be quite underwhelming.

Next Update Coming Soon

The team announced the first protocol update of the year on February 20, which brought it to version 19.6. The next one, v19.9, followed suit on March 4, and the highly anticipated v20.2 was successfully migrated before the community’s Pi Day (March 14). This one was particularly important as it laid out the fundamentals for enabling smart contract capabilities.

This rollout will occur gradually, the team said, as they aim to prioritize categories that align with utility-based product innovation and operations. The specifics will depend on the needs arising from the utility creation process, they added.

Without providing a clear deadline this time, Pi Network’s official X channel indicated that the v21 upgrade is coming, and node operators must ensure their systems are “up to date.” They added that more instructions will be coming shortly.

The Pi Mainnet has successfully upgraded to Protocol 20, laying the foundation for supporting smart contracts. Node operators, please ensure your systems are up to date and stay tuned for instructions regarding the upcoming v21 upgrade.

— Pi Network (@PiCoreTeam) March 19, 2026

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PI Resists Dropping Further

Aside from the aforementioned updates, all announced in the past month, the other big news in the Pi Network community came last week from Kraken. The veteran US exchange said it would list the underlying token for trading starting March 13.

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The combined effects for PI were instant and rather mind-blowing. The token exploded by almost 100% in the span of just days, and tapped a five-month peak of around $0.30. However, once it indeed began trading on Kraken, it suffered the consequences of another classic buy-the-rumor, sell-the-news event.

It plummeted by over 30% at one point, and kept losing value to under $0.17 marked yesterday. Interestingly, it has rebounded slightly in the past day (3%), while most other altcoins have suffered 3-5% losses.

• FTX Token changed hands at around $0.28 amid broader crypto market volatility.
• The FTX Recovery Trust will commence a $2.2 billion distribution on March 31,2026.
• Potential impact on FTT’s price could see it fall to lows of $0.24.

FTX Token (FTT) is trading lower amid overall crypto weakness and as FTX Recovery Trust announces plans to distribute $2.2 billion to approved creditors by March 31, 2026.

The distribution will mark the fourth round of payouts from the collapsed exchange’s bankruptcy proceedings.

Could this influx of capital crash the FTT token? At the time of writing, FTT hovered near $0.28 and was down 2% in the past 24 hours.

FTX to distribute $2.2 billion to creditors

FTX’s ongoing creditor repayments follow the exchange’s Chapter 11 bankruptcy filed in late 2022 as the Sam Bankman-Fried empire imploded.

SBF was convicted of various charges related to the collapse and is serving a 25-year prison sentence, with FTX now the subject of a Netflix mini-series, ‘The Altruists’, that also features a depiction of Caroline Ellison.

The expectation is that the upcoming eight-episode show will highlight the dramatic implosion of one of the crypto sector’s biggest exchanges at the time, with key questions around governance and customer protection.

Bankman-Fried recently claimed the exchange was never insolvent.

FTX creditors have nonetheless already seen a series of successful payouts, and the company is eyeing another $2.2 billion to both convenience and non-convenience class claims.

The record date for this distribution was February 14, 2026, with payouts commencing March 31 for verified claim holders and distributed within 1-3 business days via designated providers.

(1/4) FTX announced it is set to distribute its Fourth Distribution of ~$2.2 billion on 3/31/26 to holders of allowed claims in the Plan’s Convenience and Non-Convenience Classes that have completed the pre-distribution requirements.

— FTX (@FTX_Official) March 18, 2026

FTT price outlook

FTT, the native token once central to the FTX ecosystem, remains sensitive to these events, despite falling to near zero from all-time highs above $85.

Holders could see the distribution as a fresh trigger to selling pressure, putting the token’s rebound from its all-time lows of $0.24 reached in October 2025 at risk.

Data shows that at least 38.3k wallet addresses hold the FTX Token.

With FTX nearing bankruptcy closure, recovery could include a bullish flip to $0.50 and likely the psychological $1.

This will also hinge on whether broader markets stabilize in the short term.

From a technical perspective, neutral oscillators and mixed moving averages signal caution ahead of the March 31 distribution.

The daily RSI hovers near 42 and signals potential downsloping towards oversold extremes.

Meanwhile, the MACD shows mild bullish momentum with a weakening histogram.

FTT is down 22% over the past month as altcoins suffer downward pressure amid current bearish crypto conditions.

If creditors liquidate holdings with prices in decline, a retest of the all-time lows around $0.24 could follow.

Bitcoin’s BTC$70,565.84 biggest early holders, often called original gangsters, are hitting the sell button after the Federal Reserve rattled expectations for lower borrowing costs.

Blockchain data tracked by Lookonchain shows at least two long-term holders together dumped over 1,650 BTC worth more than $117.87 million early Thursday.

One veteran whale who previously sold an 11,000‑BTC stack, added another 650 BTC to his dump, while a separate early‑adopter OG with a 5,000‑BTC stash offloaded a full 1,000 BTC.

Bitcoin’s price dipped nearly 1% to $70,600 soon before press time, extending Wednesday’s 3.5% slide from $74,500, according to CoinDesk data. The broader market wilted, with the CoinDesk 20 Index 3% to 2,056 points. Ether (ETH), XRP (XRP), solana (SOL), and DOGE$0.09454 suffered similar losses.

The decline followed a hawkish Fed rate decision on Wednesday, when the central bank left the benchmark borrowing cost unchanged in the 3.5%–3.75% range but signaled a slower pace of rate cuts ahead, disappointing risk‑asset bulls.

The hawkish tone came through the so‑called interest‑rate “dot plot,” which shows where the Fed’s voting members expect interest rates to land in the months ahead. The median projection indicated only one rate cut this year, despite recent labour-market weakness. Moreover, only two committee members remained in the two‑cut camp, and Chair Powell’s own personal projection moved higher.

“The higher for longer narrative has been reinvigorated by sticky inflation and the inflationary shadow cast by rising energy costs, forcing investors to abandon their dreams of a rapid easing cycle,” Matt Mena, crypto research strategist at 21shares, said in an email.

Taken together, these developments pointed to a central bank still wary of inflation and this has led to a sharp repricing of bets on Fed rate cuts. Trading on the decentralized platform Polymarket and pricing in the CME Fed funds futures, now implies around an 80% probability of just one rate cut this year, versus a 62% probability of two to three rate cuts a month ago.

This outlook for tighter liquidity is not supportive of risk-taking in financial markets.

The global crypto market fell sharply on Thursday as new geopolitical and macroeconomic concerns threw cold water on investor appetite for risk assets.

Bitcoin (BTC), the bellwether asset, dropped nearly 5% to $70,600 on Thursday, down from the $74,000 levels seen the previous day. Ethereum (ETH) fell 6% to $2,187, while XRP (XRP), BNB (BNB), Solana (SOL), and Dogecoin (DOGE) experienced losses ranging between 3% and 6%. 

Zcash (ZEC), Worldcoin (WLD), and LayerZero (ZRO) bore some of the steepest losses amid the market-wide drop that brought the total crypto market capitalization down to $2.51 trillion.

Crypto prices fell sharply shortly after Israel launched an unprecedented cyber and drone attack on Iran’s largest gas facility, South Pars. According to reports, the massive complex powers nearly 70% of the nation’s domestic gas supply, the loss of which has threatened the country’s power grid.

The strike comes amid an escalating energy war between the U.S., Israel, and Iran, which has led to a blockade at the Strait of Hormuz, a key waterway for global oil transit, and sent crude oil and gas prices soaring to record highs. Iran had earlier vowed to push oil prices to as high as $200.

The latest attack has not only shaken the crypto market but has rippled across traditional finance as well. Notably, Gold has dropped 2.1% over the day, casting investors’ doubts over its safe haven status, while Silver fell 3.5%. Together, these precious metals erased nearly $150 billion from the market.

Traditional stock indices across the globe have also fallen in tandem with risk assets. Notably, Asian benchmarks like Japan’s Nikkei 225 and the Hang Seng have fallen over 2%. Even U.S. indices like the Dow Jones Industrial Average, Nasdaq 100, S&P 500, and Russell 2000 Index have all sharply fallen across the board.

However, oil prices took a different path, rising to new levels. Notably, Brent Crude has jumped 3% to a new record high of $112 on Thursday as traders price in a prolonged disruption in a region that remains a major source of global energy production.

Typically, when gold and cryptocurrency prices crash together, it means traders are fleeing to cash rather than rotating between alternative assets.

Hotter U.S. PPI data and Fed announcement deliver a double blow to bulls

Fears of sticky inflation also played a major role in the crypto market drop today. On Wednesday, the U.S. revealed that the PPI data came in much hotter than expected, with a record monthly gain in a year for wholesale costs. This came as the market was already cautious ahead of the Federal Reserve rate decision that was scheduled for later in the day.

In his speech, Fed Chair Jerome Powell echoed concerns surrounding elevated inflation levels. Powell clarified that the Federal Reserve is prepared to hold interest rates steady as it sticks to a data-driven strategy to combat rising inflation stemming from the oil shock. As such, market hopes for rate cuts this year have fallen slim.

The resulting crash from potential delays in rate cuts and the surging oil price as a result of Middle East tensions together triggered a liquidation cascade across leveraged crypto markets. 

Data from CoinGlass shows that over $481 million in long positions were liquidated in the past 24 hours, with Bitcoin and Ethereum accounting for the majority of it, with $143 million and $127 million in long liquidations, respectively.

Long liquidations occur when investors bet on a price increase, and the asset price drops enough to hit their margin limits, forcing the exchange to automatically close their trades.

Opinion by: Merav Ozair, PhD, blockchain and AI senior advisor.

Elon Musk and Peter Diamandis support the idea that “everything will be free.” They purport to believe that AI abundance will end poverty and provide a universal high income.

Others in the mega tech ecosystem mention the coming abundance. Demis Hassabis, for example, says AI could spark a “renaissance” of “radical abundance.”

Politicians at the World Economic Forum 2026 in Davos liked Musk’s vision. They were thrilled that their economic problems would soon be “set free.” This story is quite appealing. Who doesn’t like to get things for free? 

What does it truly mean? Would all economic activities have no cost? Would all corporations become altruistic and seek no profit?

Let us unpack the narrative.

The cost of production can be cheap, but never zero

Let’s put things in perspective. In the age of AI abundance, products and services will not arrive out of “thin air.” They would still need labor, materials, energy and infrastructure.

The advances in AI and other emerging technologies may lead to very cheap energy and highly automated production. This evolution will result in the marginal cost of most digital and even physical goods approaching zero. 

This is due to three main factors. First is the automation of labor, where machines and AI handle almost all production, logistics and many services. The second is advanced manufacturing and AI distribution, like 3D printing, robotics and AI logistics systems that drastically reduce waste and inventory, making “enough for everyone” technically feasible. Lastly, abundant energy — fusion or ultra‑cheap solar makes energy so affordable that it stops being the bottleneck. 

Because energy underlies everything physical, all other costs fall. 

Plans are already in place. Elon Musk is now prioritizing lunar manufacturing and AI, with a goal of over 1,000 gigawatts of solar power. Using solar energy instead of nuclear power will reduce energy cost to almost zero. The catch: the initial cost to establish the infrastructure on the moon is very high, and it would need to overcome major challenges.

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Under those conditions, it is plausible that education resources become somewhat free to the user because they are AI‑generated and infinitely replicable once the system is built. A large fraction of healthcare becomes extremely cheap, once the appropriate AI and robot infrastructure exists. 

At the level of physics and engineering, if the real bottlenecks — energy and automation — are abundant, costs collapse, but they do not completely disappear.

Infrastructure is the missing layer that no one talks about

Robotics and energy need to run at scale and speed to create an “abundance” of everything for everyone. For this, it needs infrastructure.

Automation and robotics run on what Jensen Haung calls “AI factories.” This is AI infrastructure, representing a shift towards treating AI development as an industrial process, enabling organizations to continuously train and refine AI models for better safety and efficiency.

They are specialized, high-performance computing data centers designed to “manufacture” intelligence by converting raw data into trained AI models and tokens, rather than simply storing data. Using advanced GPUs and massive interconnected infrastructure, they are the engines of AI applications such as autonomous vehicles, robotics and generative AI.

AI factories are expensive. They need a lot of money to build and run. Companies that have already set up the infrastructure will keep growing and improving. For example, Nvidia is five times more profitable than IBM was in the 1980s, with only a tenth of the staff. Productivity and profits will increase, because AI greatly boosts efficiency. Investments will go to those who own AI models, platforms and especially the infrastructure.

This will lead to the biggest concentration of wealth in history.

Major players include tech giants like Nvidia, AWS and SpaceX. They will continue to dominate the market, making it tough for newcomers to compete.

Governments are also involved. China is using its huge solar energy capacity to boost the energy-heavy AI boom. This creates a unique “AI and energy” ecosystem. Here, artificial intelligence optimises renewable energy generation, while solar power supports data centres. China is seen as a leader in renewable energy use.

Cheap energy is not cheap 

Energy is the fuel that runs AI factories, which are the engine of all robotics, automation and AI applications that will generate abundance. Energy fuels the infrastructure, and infrastructure runs the AI applications. Therefore, energy is the real bottleneck. Without cheap energy, this “free” theory fails.

Currently, electricity is the primary form of energy used to run the infrastructure. China is aggressively integrating renewable energy into its infrastructure and other regions are expanding renewable-powered energy into data centers as well. Electricity generation and grid capacity for AI-scale infrastructure is very costly and not scalable. To reach abundance at scale, energy must be very cheap and scalable.

What are the options?

Fission energy is a type of or nuclear energy. It is fully mature, providing stable power, but produces radioactive waste. It carries the risk of nuclear proliferation, and safety concerns regarding meltdowns. It is cheaper than current fossil-based electricity sources but still has a tangible cost, and, like the other electricity sources it is limited, and not scalable.

Fusion energy involves merging light atoms to create energy, mimicking the sun, while traditional nuclear energy splits heavy atoms. Fusion offers nearly limitless, cleaner energy without long-lived high-level waste. 

Fusion is inherently safer with no risk of a runaway chain reaction. 

The caveat, however, is that fission is what’s currently being used. Creating nuclear fusion for energy is extraordinarily expensive and requires upfront investments of hundreds of billions of dollars, and it is still experimental and likely decades away from large-scale commercial use.

Unlike nuclear fission, nuclear fusion is scalable. It is cheap but not does not cost zero. Someone has to pay the upfront costs to build the infrastructure, to create it and then maintain it. 

Elon Musk is going to the moon

Lunar solar power provides ample energy without atmospheric issues. Yet, it has high costs for launching, building and maintaining in a vacuum. Musk’s plan is to move all production, including the AI factory, to the moon.

The moon has low gravity and plenty of resources, making it the cheapest place for AI infrastructure.

Robots will terraform and build infrastructure. Humans will come to oversee and expand, while AI data centres will fuel the space economy.

With Starlink, SpaceX, Optimus robots and xAI, Musk is in a strong position to make this happen.

However, machines for making advanced AI chips need to reach the moon. These bus-sized machines require very precise conditions.

The solution is a new method called Atomically Precise Manufacturing (APM). This builds atom by atom and aligns with Musk’s “first principle” thinking.

If successful, this could unlock unlimited solar energy and raw materials from the moon and asteroids. There would be no thermal limits or atmospheric interference.

This could lead to boundless AI at a low cost. Experts say that if lunar fabrication works, it could create a trillion-dollar, or even hundreds of trillions, opportunity.

Who will benefit most from this hundred-trillion-dollar chance? Will it be shared fairly?

The soft prison of “free”

When you have centralized infrastructures and systems, whoever owns the infrastructure sets the terms of engagement. Strongly centralized systems can provide extensive “free” services, but in exchange, they often demand high control over speech, movement, data and economic choices. Non‑authoritarian welfare states may trade some individual autonomy for security and guaranteed services. Many “free” digital services today are funded by surveillance, profiling and behavioral manipulation — your data and attention are the real price. 

In a world of AI abundance, the infrastructure may be government owned. It may be owned by corporations. It could be owned through a public-private partnership. Either way, the infrastructure is centralized and the centralized power will dictate the distribution terms — how AI abundance is distributed, who gets what, under what conditions. If they wish to, they can abruptly “shut the valve” and nothing is distributed either to an individual or a group. Your dependency on their services becomes a “soft prison” stripped of your autonomy and self-sovereignty.

It might be a hundred-trillion-dollar opportunity, but the owner of the centralized infrastructure will get the lion’s share and will dictate what will trickle down to the masses.

They say if something is “free”, you are the product. This remains true in a world of sheer abundance. In that world, the product is your self-sovereignty.

Opinion by: Merav Ozair, PhD, blockchain and AI senior advisor.