Pearl (PRL) mining pools compared: fees, payouts and block share

Almost every PRL block is found by a mining pool. In the 24 hours to October 6, 2026, 17:00 UTC, six pools found about 97% of all blocks, and one of them, Kryptex, found about half. This page compares Pearl mining pools by fee, payout scheme, minimum payout, merge mining and block share, using each pool's own website or API.

How we compared pools

We read every fee, payout scheme and minimum payout for the main pools from the pool's own website or public API on October 6, 2026, between about 16:50 and 17:20 UTC. For block shares, we walked 120 blocks (124,040 to 124,159) on the official explorer, matched each coinbase address to its pool, and cross-checked with prlscan, PearlTrack and MiningPoolStats.

We did not copy aggregator tables, because many are stale: on October 6, 2026, Lord of Pearls still listed Kryptex at 1% PROP and PearlHash at 3%.

No pool sponsors this page, and it contains no pool referral links.

Pool fee plus miner fee

You pay the pool fee plus your mining software's developer fee (dev fee). As of October 6, 2026, KRig charges 0% on Kryptex but 3% elsewhere, WildRig Multi lists 0% for pearlhash, and SRBMiner-MULTI, BzMiner and PeakMiner charge 2%. So SRBMiner on HeroMiners costs 2% in total. See how to mine Pearl for each miner's official download.

Pearl mining pools compared

Data as of October 6, 2026, ~17:00 UTC. Sources: each pool's own website or API for fees, schemes and payouts; prlscan for the share of blocks found in the 24 hours to ~17:00 UTC (about 3% unattributed), cross-checked with the official explorer and MiningPoolStats.

Pool-by-pool notes

Kryptex

The largest pool, announced on June 5, 2026. Solo mining uses the login solo: followed by your address. It runs 8 regional servers on port 7048 (TCP) and 8048 (SSL), such as prl-eu.kryptex.network, and reported 26.25 EH/s from about 17,700 miners on October 6, 2026.

PearlHash

The oldest active public pool (first block on May 8, 2026) and the one with the most blocks overall, about 18,275 according to prlscan. It pays after each "epoch" without publishing the scheme. The main server is pool.pearlhash.xyz:9000, and it recommends WildRig Multi for RTX 20-series and newer cards. No official Pearl source links to PearlHash, so treat it as an independent pool.

HeroMiners

Its API sets PROP payouts, despite generic "PPS+ and PROPX" text on its homepage. Solo mining uses the solo: prefix. It runs port 1200 in 18 regions, for example de.pearl.herominers.com:1200, and reported about 2.58 EH/s from 2,426 miners on October 6, 2026.

LuckyPool

LuckyPool charges no transfer fee. Its 19 servers use ports chosen by rig size: 3360 below 500 TH/s, 3361 up to 1,000 TH/s and 3362 above, over TCP or TLS. It reported 3.52 EH/s from 2,643 miners on October 6, 2026.

Pearl Fortune

Pearl Fortune has found the third-most blocks overall (8,788 according to prlscan). Third-party miners connect to global.pearlfortune.org:8888.

Pearlski (JetSki Pool)

Pearlski switched from PROP to PPLNS after its 796th block. Its TLS endpoint is pearlski.jetskipool.ai:6970, with servers in France, Poland, Canada, Singapore and Australia. Its hashrate swings widely (2.83 EH/s on October 6, 2026, about 1.24 EH/s a day earlier), and only 56 addresses ran 2,654 workers.

f2pool

f2pool opened on July 6, 2026 at 1% PPLNS and moved to 3% PPS on July 10, when it added modelOS (MDL) merged mining. It suspended the pool on August 7, citing "instability in the PRL network", and resumed it on September 30. It needs an f2pool account and uses pearl.f2pool.com:5500.

Smaller and inactive pools

• 2Miners (2miners.com): PPLNS 1% on prl.2miners.com:1818, SOLO 1.5% on solo-prl.2miners.com:1919, 1 PRL every 2 hours. About 31 PH/s.
• AlphaPool (pearl.alphapool.tech): 1% time-weighted PPLNS, payouts every 4 hours, MDL merge mining that has never paid out. No blocks in the last 24 hours.
• BaikalMine (0.5% to 0.75% PPLNS), MoneroOcean (0% PPLNS), pooly.ca (1% to 1.5% PPLNS) and K1Pool (0% PPLNS, 1% SOLO, MDL): each under 40 PH/s, terms from MiningPoolStats, hashrate.no and MiningBoard, not checked on the pools' own sites.
• PullSignal: 1% PPLNS or solo with free MDL merge mining, but 0 miners and 0 blocks on October 6, 2026.
• Offline or inactive: MinePRL (offline, last block on June 14, 2026), TW Pool, WoolyPooly, Akoya, PearlerPool, Himpool, Suprnova and Grand Pool. Some trackers still list MinePRL and Akoya as active.

Hashrate concentration

Two pools find most Pearl blocks. Kryptex found 40.5% of blocks over the last 90 days, 48.0% over 30 days and about half in the most recent windows (PearlTrack, October 6, 2026).

Data as of October 6, 2026, ~17:00 UTC. Share of blocks found, not of hashrate. Sources: official explorer (our count of blocks 124,040 to 124,159), prlscan, MiningPoolStats, PearlTrack.

By its own reported hashrate (26.25 EH/s), Kryptex had about 40% to 44% of the network on October 6, 2026, measured against the WhatToMine, MiningPoolStats and Kryptex estimates (about 59 to 67 EH/s). Higher estimates of up to 71 EH/s would put it nearer 37%. PearlTrack estimates that large pools report 20% to 30% less hashrate than their blocks imply. The exact share is uncertain; about half of recent blocks is what the chain shows.

Why a pool near 50% matters

In proof-of-work, whoever builds block templates for most of the hashrate can, in theory, rewrite recent blocks and enable double spends. It can also keep chosen transactions out of the chain, or withhold blocks to win more than its fair share ("selfish mining"). Some of these attacks can pay off well below 50%. We found no evidence of such an attack on Pearl. The risk is limited because a pool's hashrate belongs to thousands of separate miners, about 17,700 at Kryptex, who can leave. You can help: when fees and features are similar, pick a pool outside the two largest, and split large farms across pools.

PPS+, PPLNS, PROP and SOLO explained

Pools find blocks at random, so income varies. The payout scheme decides who carries that luck.

Luck matters more on small pools. A pool with 0.1% of network hashrate finds about one block every two days at October 6, 2026 block times, so PROP or PPLNS pay there arrives in rare lumps. One RTX 4090 (about 305 TH/s) mining solo would find a block about once a year on average at the October 6, 2026 difficulty, and less often as difficulty rises; see Pearl mining profitability for the math. A pool can only spend a block reward after 100 more blocks (coinbase maturity): about 4.6 hours at recent block times and 5.4 hours at the 194-second target. PROP, PPLNS and SOLO payouts usually wait for it; PPS pools pay from their own balance.

What pools must do at a hard fork

Pearl's proof-of-work rules have changed four times since launch, at blocks 71,935, 91,630, 96,251 and 99,000. Each change is work for pools, because the pool, not the miner, turns winning work into a block. Miners send shares as "plain proofs", which the pool checks in about 1 to 4 ms each (HeroMiners operator, GitHub issue #156). When a share meets the network target, the pool generates a zero-knowledge (ZK) certificate, a compact proof that the work is valid, which took 7 to 18 seconds on a 10-core Apple M5 laptop in one community benchmark. Slow proving raises the risk that another block wins. At a fork, a pool must:

1. Upgrade its node before the activation height. For the salted noise-seed hard fork at block 99,000 (August 11, 2026), node v1.4.1 came out about 90 minutes before activation.
2. Upgrade ZK proving and share checks to the new certificate version. Since block 99,000, templates require certificate version 3. The official upgrade guide for miners and mining pools says to read the version from the block template, not hardcode the fork height.
3. Enforce the rules the basic share check skips: dense proofs only (since block 91,630) and the rank penalty (since block 96,251). Otherwise the pool credits shares that could never become valid blocks.
4. Tell miners which versions to run. From block 99,000, old miners produced invalid shares; Kryptex listed SRBMiner 3.5.3, PeakMiner 2.9.0 and KRig 1.2.0 among the updated versions.

The next change, the FP8 upgrade (draft proposal PIP-3; code in open pull request #311), brings certificate version 4 and had no activation height as of October 6, 2026. Its reference miner accepts only H100/H200, B200/B300 and RTX 50 / RTX PRO 6000 cards. Watch your pool's announcements and the official releases, or our hard fork tracker.

Is there an official Pearl pool?

Not a public one. Pearl Research Labs lists no pool on pearlresearch.ai, and its GitHub repository contains no pool server.

A server at pool.pearlresearch.ai exists, but it sends visitors to a GitHub sign-in that asks to read their GitHub organizations, which suggests access is limited to a team or partners. Its fee, eligibility and terms are not public. The often-repeated claim of an official pool charging 20% and accepting only H100 and H200 cards traces to one Hashrate Index post (June 2, 2026) that cites no source; we could not confirm it.

The official way to mine is solo: the vllm-miner and pearl-gateway mine against your own pearld node while serving a language model through vLLM. On the live network this runs only on NVIDIA H100 and H200 (sm90) GPUs and cannot connect to a stratum pool. Consumer RTX and AMD cards mine through the third-party pools on this page.

Merge mining (MDL, NOCK)

Merge mining lets the same work count on a second blockchain, so your shares can earn a bonus coin without extra hashrate. As of October 6, 2026, two bonus coins are offered alongside PRL:

• modelOS (MDL), a fork of the Pearl code: f2pool (MDL address in account settings), PullSignal and AlphaPool (add + and your MDL address to your login), HeroMiners and K1Pool.
• Nockchain (NOCK): LuckyPool, Pearl Fortune and Pearlski (at Pearlski, NOCK is optional and you register a NOCK address from your miner's IP).

Treat both as bonuses of uncertain value. We found no CoinGecko listing for MDL. AlphaPool's MDL side has never paid out: on October 6, 2026 its API showed 1,910 MDL blocks mined, 0 MDL paid to miners and payouts not live.

How to switch pools

1. Read the new pool's setup page. Note the server, port, TLS option and minimum payout.
2. Check your miner. Run a version that supports the current fork rules, and check its dev fee on that pool.
3. Change only the pool address in your .bat file, config or HiveOS flight sheet. Keep your prl1p address as the username. The worker separator (. or /) depends on the miner and pool.
4. Restart and watch the dashboard. Look up your address on the pool's site and check accepted, stale and rejected shares.
5. Collect your old balance. Unpaid rewards stay on the old pool until they pass its minimum payout.

With SRBMiner-MULTI, for example, only one argument changes (add --tls true for a TLS port):

SRBMiner-MULTI --algorithm pearlhash --pool POOL_HOST:PORT --wallet YOUR_PRL1P_ADDRESS.WORKER

Payouts only go to native Pearl addresses, which normally start with prl1p. Perle (a Solana token also called PRL) and wrapped PRL are different assets. Set up the official Pearl wallet first, and read our guide to fake PRL tokens.

Frequently asked questions