Sentiment Analysis of Public Opinion on Pi Network on Reddit Using FinBERT

Abstrak

The rapid growth of blockchain technology has led to the emergence of new cryptocurrencies, including Pi Network, which emphasizes accessibility through mobile-based mining. This study aims to answer the research question of whether FinBERT, a financial domain-specific transformer model, can effectively classify public sentiment in informal Reddit discussions related to Pi Network. FinBERT was first evaluated on a labeled financial sentiment dataset to assess its performance in a structured financial context before being applied to Reddit data. Model performance was measured using accuracy, precision, recall, and F1-score. After validation, the model was used to analyze one thousand twenty Reddit comments discussing Pi Network. Text preprocessing included cleaning, case folding, tokenization, stopword removal, stemming, and sequence standardization. The evaluation results show that FinBERT achieved an accuracy of eighty-five point ninety-eight percent on the financial validation dataset, with strong precision and recall across sentiment classes. When applied to Reddit comments, neutral sentiment was the most dominant, followed by positive and negative sentiments. Pi Network was selected as the case study because, unlike more established cryptocurrencies, it is still in an early stage of development and relies heavily on community participation, making public opinion particularly important for understanding its adoption and credibility