Charting the Journey from Pion to Muon

Pion’s strategic milestones before planning Muon/$MUON’s launch

Published in

Muon

3 min readMay 24, 2024

Pion — Muon ecosystem’s Canary network — has been running for over 7 months and some Muon holders are asking when we are going to launch Muon/$MUON. Read on to see our plans.

Path to Pion

Muon was designed as a tri-network ecosystem: a Testnet (ALICE), a Canary network (Pion) and a Mainnet (Muon). The Canary and Mainnet have more or less the same use cases but with certain differences in tokenomics, collateral, subnets and update frequency (See the details.) You can think of ALICE as the testing arena, Pion as the Prototype and Muon as the final polished product.

Launch of Pion on October 18 was the culmination of several months of hard work and development. To ensure the security and smooth operation of the network, several stepping stones were laid including:

Multicore processing
Threshold Signature Scheme
Shield Server
Random Rotating Subnets
Launch of ALICE and its upgrade to ALICE V2
Uniqueness Verification

As a token of our appreciation for their participation, $MUON holders and ALICE operators were granted a node-drop — bonPION allocation to run Pion nodes and earn rewards — at the launch of Pion.

Wen Muon: Strategic Planning and Next Steps

Now with these milestones met and Pion operating efficiently, it is time we took the next steps before we can plan for the launch of Muon.

We are currently focusing on publicizing Pion’s distinctive features so that more and more projects recognize Pion as a secure, stateless DON and start building on it. Moreover, Pion’s true capabilities as well as its stability can only be represented when its subnets of nodes actually respond to a large number of requests.

We should not forget that Pion is not a Meme token project designed for quick, short-term gains; it is a technical innovation that presents a solution to some of the blockchain ecosystem’s fundamental challenges such as interoperability and scalability. That is why the value of its native token — $PION — depends largely on its widespread use. This means users who are really into its theoretical groundwork and take an active part in its long-term growth will benefit from Pion the most.

Until Pion achieves such a level of stability and usage, launching the Muon network, with more or less the same use-cases (but larger stakes) does not make sense. But launching Muon/$MUON under optimal conditions will ensure sustained benefits for users, and avoid potential disruptions or setbacks down the line.

So our best suggestion for MUON-allocation owners is to run a Pion node (if they haven’t yet). However, considering what is said here, if there is a MUON holder who is not willing/able to run a node or is still not satisfied, contact one of our admins on DC or TG to learn what to do.

‘Wen MUON’: NOW! (Edited on June 12)

As we are still getting questions about “Wen Muon”, we decided to add this section to the article to provide more clarification for everyone.

Muon will launch when PION achieves 100,000–1,000,000 daily transactions on average.

Why This Benchmark?

An average transaction cost of 10 cents for 100,000–1,000,000 transactions means $10,000 — $100,000 in daily revenue. This indicates robust usage, network health and readiness.

Impact on MUON Pre-Sale Participants & Pion Node Operators

This strategy means all the value of Muon Network and all the fees generated by the network will accrue in $PION tokens. Once the network reaches this benchmark, PION’s market cap will be much higher than it is right now.

As everyone received bonPION for free at its launch, you can use this period to collect a significant PION holding by operating a node. There is currently no point in waiting for MUON; once MUON launches, the value of PION might be manifold higher than the value of MUON (as PION will have 1,000,000 daily transactions while MUON will start with 0 apps and 0 usage).

Pion is the Muon ecosystem’s Canary and first mainnet. It is a chain-independent and stateless DON (Decentralized Oracle Network) that enables dApps to make their off-chain components decentralized. By incorporating Pion (by Muon), the manner in which decentralized applications store, process, and access data will be fundamentally transformed.

Run a Pion node.