Who is buying every drop in pi? The 400 million meter PI whale

One anonymous wallet spent a year absorbing the supply that others were selling. This is currently the largest single holder of PI, with no one claiming it and at today’s price it sits on one of the worst trades in the token’s short history.

Every cryptocurrency community has wallets that they monitor. The Pi network has $GAS…ODM, and viewing has become almost a practice of faith. For about a year, this single anonymous address did the only thing that almost no one else in the Pi ecosystem tried to do. It is a dynamic crypto.news examined with coverage of the supply schedule that whales are battling to relentlessly buy into price collapses, pulling millions of tokens from exchanges every week while pumping fresh supply into a market that daily unlocks cannot absorb. It is now the single largest holder of PI outside of the project’s own Foundation wallet. No one knows who is controlling it. The community variously referred to this as a core team acquisition, an exchange preparing to go public, and, with a straight face, a new Satoshi wallet. What the data actually shows is more interesting and less flattering than any of those theories.

What the wallet actually did

That’s because the Pi’s block explorer makes the mechanics very readable. Tracking data from PiScan shows labeled addresses. $GAS…ODMs systematically withdraw PI from centralized exchanges (mainly OKX, Gate.io, MEXC) in transfers of millions of tokens over an extended period of time. By mid-2025, the wallet had accumulated approximately 331 million PI, giving it a position worth approximately $148.5 million at the then-current prices. By late May 2026, on-chain data showed over 400 million tokens, with some days exceeding 1.5 million PI in a single session, a near-daily accumulation pattern that continued into the spring.

Two characteristics distinguish this behavior from normal trading. First, the direction is one-way. The wallet withdraws from the exchange to its own vault and does not send the tokens back. This is an on-chain signature of an entity that removes supply from circulation rather than reversing it. Second, timing centers around weakness. Wallet inflows intensified during the price decline and buying accelerated as PI fell towards the support zone. This is a pattern that discretionary traders rarely produce. This is because it requires either a belief that is close to indifference to drawdowns, or a directive that has no regard for profits at all.

Scale is what makes it so consequential. With 331 million tokens, the wallet is already the sixth largest holder in the ecosystem, surpassing balances held by exchange wallets on platforms such as Bitget and MEXC. With over 400 million people, it became the largest single holder other than a foundation. As for how much supply this represents, daily unlocks currently add approximately 6.5 million PI to the float. This means that the whale has absorbed around two months’ worth of continuous unlock supply in a market where finding a buyer for one day’s worth is proving difficult.

Theories and their meanings

Two explanations dominate community discussions, but they have fundamentally different meanings. The first and most widely believed $GAS…ODM is part of the Pi core team and acts as a buyback wallet that repurchases tokens during the unlock period to stabilize prices and manage supply. The situation is decent. Accumulation intensifies just as supply pressures peak, the action looks coercive rather than opportunistic, and projects in large treasuries have both the means and the incentive to protect their tokens at the distribution stage. The core team has never acknowledged any role.

A second theory is that this wallet belongs to a major exchange that is secretly building up inventory ahead of listing. This attracted attention because the buildup coincided with persistent speculation about a Tier 1 listing, and because exchanges are pre-positioning inventory in earnest before the market opens. However, over time, this theory has weakened. Kraken and OKX opened their PI markets in 2026 and the accumulation continued, but Binance and Coinbase have not yet listed. No exchange verifies ownership of the address.

The meanings are very different. If it’s the core team, a significant share of what looks like organic market demand for PI will be projects buying their own tokens. This means that the price signal is partially manufactured and will further collapse when the buying stops. It is not illegal and financial management is common, but it is important information that the holder does not have. If it is an exchange, its accumulation is inventory, not confidence, and it says nothing about the prospects of the token. If neither is the case, and the wallet belongs to a private entity that makes long-term bets, then it is simply the largest and most patient position in the ecosystem. The honest answer is that no one outside the wallet knows, and the ambiguity itself is important. An unattributed entity controls a block of supply large enough to move the market, and the ecosystem has decided to interpret that as a sense of security.

Bull Incident: Someone Knows Something

The optimistic interpretation that dominates sentiment in the Pi community treats the wallet as a vote of confidence expressed in the only language that doesn’t lie: money. Sustained accumulation through brutal drawdowns suggests calculated intent rather than casual speculation. Whoever is behind it has been buying as they watched PI fall through support levels one after the other, but it’s either information or belief, and it’s understandable that the community would like to believe it’s the former.

The supply-side argument has real force. Pi’s central problem is the floating exchange rate system. Approximately 1.21 billion pieces of PI are expected to be in circulation by 2026, with an average daily drip volume of about 6.5 million pieces. At recent prices, this means that the market must absorb tens of millions of dollars in new supply each month simply to keep prices constant. Any organization that permanently removes hundreds of millions of tokens from exchanges and self-custries them is directly countering this mechanism. There is no selling pressure on tokens stored in cold wallets. If whales continue to buy and do not sell, the effective float will shrink and the precondition for eventual reprice is that the float will become smaller.

Wallets also have a measurable psychological impact on the ecosystem, which is important for a project whose entire theme depends on the community. Sentiment tools turned positive towards the accumulation narrative and ecosystem activity continued regardless of price. Pi App Studio brought thousands of applications online, Ecosystem Directory Staking pulled in tens of millions of PI from users who spotlighted their projects, and the launch of Pi2Day products propelled fee-in PI utilities. Visible whales create a feedback loop, and confidence in smart money maintains the enthusiasm of builders and keeps the ecosystem responsive to future demand. In that reading, $GAS…ODM has been a burden on morale, if not a burden on price.

Bear case: it didn’t work out

Now, regarding arithmetic, it is unkind. Its stake hit a high of nearly $148.5 million when the wallet position was reported at 331 million tokens. Since then, the PI has fallen below the $0.10 line it held until the spring, dropping about 15% in one day ahead of the next wave of unlocks, before hitting a new all-time low near $0.071 in July. Against a peak of $2.99, the token is down about 97%. If you execute the same 400 million tokens at a price close to $0.08, the position is worth a fraction of what it was when the accumulation made headlines. Anyone $GAS…ODM has been one of the worst performing large positions in the history of the token and is still adding to it.

This is a significant reconstruction of the bull case. The community sees sustained purchases as insight, but sustained purchases that coincide with a 97% drawdown are equally consistent with entities that are trapped, forced, or just plain wrong. If the wallet is a core team buyback, then the defense has failed by itself. Hundreds of millions of tokens were spent to absorb supply, and the price hit new lows regardless. This is the definition of intervention failure. If every dip is followed by a deeper decline, buying every dip does not demonstrate knowledge.

The supply argument is also countered by data. PiScan shows that tagged exchange wallets hold a total of approximately 545 million PI, with net inflows continuing, and inflows to exchanges typically precede sales rather than accumulation. Whale purchases were not enough to offset widespread movements in supplies to trading venues. Some wallets, even at scale, struggle with structured release schedules that never stop. A single buyer can absorb individual events. A continuous drip every day is another enemy because it doesn’t stop and gets worse due to emotions, news and prices.

Concentration issues that no one wants to discuss

Whale stories point to something bigger and nastier than one address. The founding promise of the Pi Network was democratic distribution. It is a currency that anyone can mine from their phone, without the need for expensive hardware or venture allocation. The reality of on-chain ownership is not like that. According to PiScan data, only 22 wallets qualify as whales holding at least 10 million PI, while there are millions of accounts holding almost nothing. Approximately 84% of the more than 15.9 million accounts fall into the smallest category of less than 10 PI, which is equivalent to small change. Tens of billions of coins are stored in Pi Foundation’s own top wallet.

Compare that with token marketing and the tension is clear. The network built on the pitch of mass participation has created an ownership structure in which a small number of addresses (most of which are associated with foundations) control supply and the largest independent accumulator is an entity that does not identify itself. This is a decentralization issue with real regulatory weight, given that the Market Structure Bill moving through Congress contemplates a decentralization test for classifying digital assets. Pi’s defenders point to its millions of migrated wallets and vast customer base as evidence of genuine circulation. An extensive list points in another direction.

None of this is unique to Pi, all major tokens have concentration issues. But most of them have never claimed otherwise. The gap between people’s crypto frameworks and wallet maps dominated by whales and microbes is exactly the kind of problem that will become a problem when prices stop rising. Because that’s when holders start reading the ledger, not the roadmap. 14 million accounts holding less than $4 each is not a decentralized economy. A marketing funnel connected to blockchain.

What a share buyback actually means

It’s worth taking the core team theory seriously for a while and following its conclusions. Because if that’s true, the impact goes far beyond a single wallet. Token buybacks are a normal corporate action in cryptocurrencies. Projects with treasury reserves regularly purchase their own tokens to support prices, absorb unlocked supply, or de-float, and some of the largest companies in the space have formal buy-and-burn programs that are open to the public. The mechanics don’t matter. Disclosure.

Pai’s approach to supply management is unusual in that it makes the whale theory more plausible. This project relies on halving and mining rate reduction rather than burn, meaning there is no mechanism to permanently destroy supply, but this difference is important when considering why Pi doesn’t have a burn valve for supply. All coins ever mined will eventually be circulated and unlocked through migration. Projects in this position are seeing around 6.5 million tokens hit the float every day without a burn valve to relieve pressure, but there is just one recourse left if they want to protect the price, and that is to buy back the tokens with treasury funds and stay put. That’s exactly the action $GAS…ODM exhibits.

If it is happening, the holder has a right to know, and the silence becomes the story. Disclosed share buybacks are a strategy that allows investors to set the price. Investors know the size, mission, funding sources, and termination conditions. Undisclosed is something else entirely, as market participants read manufactured demand as an organic certainty and make decisions based on it. The community spent a year interpreting the wallet as smart money to validate the project. If smart money turns out to be a project that validates itself, then all the inferences drawn from its accumulation will quickly collapse, most quickly for those who bought because the whales were buying.

Below that are more difficult questions. A buyback funded by the Treasury is a transfer. Projects spend reserves that in a sense belong to the ecosystem to support prices that benefit current holders, including the largest holders. If it works, no one will object. If that fails and the PI hits a record low a year later, there will be no reserves and prices will fall anyway. This is the worst of both outcomes and the scenario for which the on-chain data is most consistent. Pi’s own venture funding history is instructive here. The project announced a $100 million fund, but more than a year later, little has been made public to show how it will unfold. The pattern of large commitments being announced and subsequent thin disclosures is the context in which nine-figure wallets without attribution should be read.

None of this is proven and should not be presented as if it were. The core team has never acknowledged wallets and the exchange and inventory theory is still alive and well. However, the range of explanations is narrow, and none of them are more interesting than the community’s established readings. Either the project is secretly spending reserves to defend a line it has already lost, the exchange is holding inventory for a listing that is yet to come, or an unidentified party made a huge and very bad bet. Those are the options. None of this is a reason to buy.

what to see

Useful signals from here are narrow and specific. The first is $GAS…ODM continues to buy below $0.10. The accumulation from previous drawdowns was significant, but occurred at higher prices. There are no discretionary buyers who will drop an average of 97% for no reason other than profit, so continued aggressive buying of tokens trading at all-time lows will strengthen the case that companies are mandated rather than opportunistic.

The second is attribution. As soon as the core team approves the buyback program or ownership is confirmed from the exchange claiming the address, the price of the story will change in either direction. The silence has served the bulls well. Because the unattached whale can be whatever the community needs. Clarity removes that option.

The third question is whether the supply calculation changes at all. It is reported that approximately 1.21 billion PI will be in circulation in 2026, and the next tranche will exceed 127 million tokens, up from approximately 103.7 million tokens in the previous month. To absorb demand that the ecosystem has not yet generated, Pi2Day’s PI product is the project’s first serious attempt to create demand that exists independently of speculation. If these products show real usage, measured by actual charges rather than announcements, Whale’s case becomes even stronger, whatever that may be. Otherwise, the positions held by any one wallet will grow larger and less valuable each month, and the hottest addresses in the Pi ecosystem will end up being a case study in how supply design shapes prices and how much money it takes before it can no longer hold the line.