Pi Network activates Protocol v25 with zero-knowledge primitives

Pi Network activated Protocol v25 on its mainnet, adding BN254 elliptic curve operations and Poseidon hashing to the execution layer. The two primitives together are what zk-SNARK constructions need to verify proofs on-chain at practical cost, and their absence had kept zero-knowledge applications off the network.

The Core Team shipped a redesigned mining application alongside the protocol change, covering navigation, interface and a dark mode, for a user base it puts at 60 million.

The most immediate use the team points to is identity: proving that an account has completed know-your-customer checks without publishing the underlying personal data in the transaction that asserts it. Privacy-preserving smart contracts and zk-rollup style constructions become possible on the same primitives.

Moving cryptographic primitives into the execution layer rather than leaving them to contract code is what separates proofs that verify at usable cost from proofs that only work on paper.