Pearl (PRL) crypto guide: mining, wallets and pools, explained

Pearl (PRL) is a Layer-1 blockchain where GPUs earn new coins by multiplying matrices, the math at the heart of AI models. Its mainnet launched on April 27, 2026. Since then, mining revenue per TH/s has fallen about 85% from its late-May peak (as of October 6, 2026), the network has gone through four consensus upgrades, and its PRL ticker is shared with several unrelated tokens. This independent guide explains how to mine PRL, choose a pool, set up a wallet and tell the real coin from look-alikes, with every changing number dated.

Pearl in 60 seconds

• What it is: a Bitcoin-style blockchain forked from btcd, a Go implementation of Bitcoin, with no smart contracts. It replaces Bitcoin's SHA-256 mining with proof of useful work: miners multiply matrices on GPUs and attach a zero-knowledge proof, a compact proof that the work was done correctly. The protocol checks that the multiplication is correct, not that it comes from real AI work. How Pearl works.
• Who builds it: Pearl Research Labs, co-founded by Omri Weinstein (CEO) and Ilan Komargodski, both associate professors at the Hebrew University. Their paper Proofs of Useful Work from Arbitrary Matrix Multiplication appeared in the ESA 2026 proceedings as an invited-talk paper. No funding round or investor has been publicly disclosed.
• Launch, with a nuance: the genesis block is timestamped April 27, 2026, 09:00 UTC. The code has no premine, no developer fee and no treasury. But launch difficulty was 1, so the first 40,000 blocks took 5.9 days and minted about 121.7M PRL, roughly 36% of all PRL mined by October 6, 2026. The team said the low starting difficulty was partly meant to fund the core team. How much the team mined is undisclosed.
• Supply: capped at 2.1 billion PRL, approached gradually. There are no halvings: the block reward falls a little every block, from 3,229.64 PRL at block 1 to 2,277.05 PRL on October 6, 2026. Half the cap is mined at block 650,226, around the end of 2029 at the target pace. At that pace, supply roughly doubles in the 12 months after October 6, 2026. PRL tokenomics.
• Block time: the target is 194 seconds (3 min 14 s). Difficulty, the measure of how hard it is to find a block, adjusts after every block. Blocks arrived about every 165 seconds in the 24 hours to about 17:00 UTC on October 6, 2026, so difficulty keeps rising until blocks slow to the target.
• How mining works today: Pearl Research Labs publishes one miner, vllm-miner. It mines solo to your own node while serving an AI model, and runs only on NVIDIA H100 and H200 cards. Gaming GPUs, NVIDIA and AMD, mine through third-party, mostly closed-source "pearlhash" miners connected to community pools.
• It is not Perle: Perle is a different project on Solana that also uses the ticker PRL. It is the "PRL" listed on Coinbase and Upbit, and it traded around $0.11 on October 6, 2026 (CoinGecko). Native Pearl has no contract address. Pearl vs Perle.

Start here: how to mine PRL

1. Get a wallet and a prl1p address. Install the official Pearl Wallet (desktop, v2.0.7 as of October 6, 2026) from its GitHub release, check its SHA-256 hash against checksums.txt, and write the 12 seed words on paper. A normal Pearl address starts with prl1p and is 63 characters long. The wallet guide walks you through it.
2. Pick a miner for your GPU. H100 and H200 owners can run the official vllm-miner. Gaming GPUs need a third-party miner such as SRBMiner-MULTI, BzMiner, WildRig Multi or PeakMiner, downloaded only from its developer's official repository. Their developer fees, the share of mining time each developer keeps, range from 0% to 2% as of October 6, 2026. The mining guide covers setup, and the hashrate by GPU page lists speeds per card.
3. Choose a pool. Pool fees ranged from 0% to 5% on October 6, 2026, depending on the pool and payout scheme. PPS+ pays a steady rate per share at a higher fee, while PPLNS and PROP pay according to the pool's luck. As of October 6, 2026, one pool, Kryptex, had found about half of recent blocks and the top three more than 80% (official explorer, prlscan and MiningPoolStats), so spreading hashrate to smaller pools reduces that concentration. Compare them on the pools page.
4. Check profitability before you spend. On October 6, 2026, at $1.14 per PRL, a tuned RTX 4090 (304.6 TH/s, hashrate.no benchmark) grossed about $6.97 a day before pool fee, dev fee and electricity. No GPU? You can rent one on Vast.ai, but on October 6, 2026 renting was roughly break-even or a small loss. Run the numbers on the profitability page and read how to rent a GPU first.
5. Keep up with network upgrades. Pearl's upgrades activate at fixed block heights, and miners do not vote on them. After a hard fork, a rule change that old software cannot follow, a miner that is not updated in time produces invalid shares. After the rank-penalty soft fork, which tightened the rules, old miners lost 50% to 87.5% of their hashrate. Follow the hard forks page and the official GitHub releases.

Key numbers on October 6, 2026

Data as of October 6, 2026, ~17:00 UTC. Sources: explorer.pearlresearch.ai (height, difficulty, block times), Pearl's consensus code (reward, supply), WhatToMine, hashrate.no, MiningPoolStats and pool websites (hashrate range), CoinGecko (price at about 16:52 UTC). Yield is derived from difficulty: PRL/day = hashrate (H/s) × 86,400 × block reward / (difficulty × 2^48).

These figures change with every block. For live values, check the official explorer. The profitability page shows how to turn them into an estimate for your own GPU.

Official links and how to check them

• Pearl links no pool, exchange, bridge or community wallet. The only "Join the Network" link on its network page goes to GitHub. If a site calls itself the official Pearl pool, wallet or bridge, look for a link to it on pearlresearch.ai or in the GitHub repository. The address pool.pearlresearch.ai exists, but it sits behind a GitHub organization login and its terms are not public. Pearl's own domain also hosts compute.pearlresearch.ai, a cloud-mining service with a web wallet; we have not verified its pricing or terms.
• Pick the right GitHub release. The "Latest" badge points to the node release (v1.4.11, September 29, 2026). The desktop wallet has its own release, pearl-wallet-v2.0.7 (September 30, 2026). That release includes checksums.txt with SHA-256 hashes but no GPG signature, so compare the hash of your download before you run it.
• Identify the coin by its identifiers, not its ticker. Native Pearl is CoinGecko id pearl-2 (its Pearl page), CoinMarketCap id 41876, with no contract address and addresses starting with prl1p.
• No official Telegram. Pearl's official pages link no Telegram group, so treat any "official Pearl Telegram" with suspicion.

Latest network upgrade

The most recent consensus change is the salted noise-seed hard fork. It activated at block 99,000 on August 11, 2026, at 12:03 UTC, and changed how miners derive the noise added to the matrix work. Nodes needed v1.4.1, published only about 90 minutes before activation. Pools needed new proving code, and every miner needed an update: old miners produced invalid shares from block 99,000 on.

It was the fourth fork in two months, after the MoE hard fork (block 71,935) and two soft forks (blocks 91,630 and 96,251). As of October 6, 2026, the current releases are node v1.4.11 and Pearl Wallet v2.0.7.

Next: the FP8 upgrade

Pearl announced a floating-point (FP8) version of its proof of useful work on X on September 14, 2026. As of October 6, 2026, it is not scheduled: the proposal (PIP-3, "FP PoUW Certificates") is still a draft, the code sits in an open pull request #311, and no activation height is set. In that code, the reference miner accepts only H100/H200, B200/B300, RTX 50-series and RTX PRO 6000 cards. RTX 30, RTX 40 and A100 cards are not on the list. On September 19, 2026, the SRBMiner developer warned that an upcoming upgrade could make consumer GPUs "pretty much useless". Read the hard forks page before buying hardware for Pearl.

What not to do

The Pearl vs Perle and fake tokens page lists every known look-alike with its network and identifiers.

The complete guide

About this guide

Pearl Coin Guide is written for miners and PRL holders. We check facts against primary sources: Pearl's code and releases on GitHub, the official explorer, Pearl's own website, and each pool's and miner's own pages. We label what is official and what comes from the community, and we date every number that changes. The current snapshot is from October 6, 2026, around 17:00 UTC.

Mining figures are estimates, and past revenue says nothing about future revenue. We do not link to exchanges or trading platforms, and nothing on this site is financial advice. Our legal notice explains who publishes the guide and how we handle disclosures.

Frequently asked questions