Pi Network has brought RoboPay on board as a payment partner for robot services, including grocery deliveries, property patrols, industrial inspections, and humanoid assistance. The announcement came alongside news that over 240,000 Pioneers took part in a test distribution of the SLICE token, committing roughly 16 million Test-Pi for 10 million SLICE tokens. Meanwhile, the network is pushing toward a major protocol upgrade with a hard deadline of August 11 for node operators.
RoboPay partnership for autonomous robot payments
RoboPay is an on-chain system built by the non-profit Fabric Foundation. It lets AI agents discover, hire, and pay robots without human intervention. Pi Network uses a launchpad model for such integrations: committed Pi coins go directly into a liquidity pool paired with the newly issued ecosystem asset, rather than the project keeping the raised funds. That structure means the Pi community's tokens are locked in the pool, not held by the team.
SLICE token test distribution draws 240,000 Pioneers
The SLICE token is tied to the game 'Slice of Pi' and remains strictly in test mode. The team has said it will never move to mainnet. Still, the testnet event saw strong participation: 240,000 Pioneers committed Test-Pi to receive SLICE tokens. The distribution used a 1.6 ratio, meaning 16 million Test-Pi were committed for 10 million SLICE. It's a dry run for how future ecosystem token launches might work on Pi's platform.
Protocol upgrade deadline and node operator requirements
Pi Network completed protocol version 25 at the end of July. Version 26 is described as a major milestone leading to the final planned upgrade, version 27. The team set August 11 as the deadline for deploying version 26. Node operators who don't upgrade their systems by that date risk being disconnected from the network. That's a firm cutoff, not a suggestion.
PI token price recovers from all-time low
PI hit an all-time low of just over $0.07 in mid-July. It then surged to $0.10 before falling back below $0.09 and then $0.08. Support at $0.074 held. Recently the price jumped from under $0.083 to over $0.086, putting it 22% above the all-time low. A large portion of those gains came after the team announced the upcoming version 26 upgrade. The price is still well below the $0.10 peak from earlier in July, but the recovery suggests the upgrade news gave traders a reason to buy.
The August 11 deadline is now the key date. Node operators who miss it will be cut off, and the network moves closer to its final planned protocol version. Whether the price can hold its gains until then is an open question.
