What Is Pearl (PRL)? The AI Mining Coin That Mined 40,000 Blocks in Six Days

Pearl (PRL) is a layer-1 blockchain that mined its first 40,000 blocks in 5.9 days after its 27 April 2026 launch, paying GPU miners for proof of work produced by the matrix multiplication inside AI models. Its code caps supply at 2.1 billion PRL, and 312.72 million had been mined by the 15 September close.

That launch pace is the mechanism behind the supply. Pearl's emission formula pays the most per block at the lowest heights, and mining difficulty started at 1, so the first 40,000 blocks arrived about every 13 seconds against a 194-second target. By 3 May the chain had minted 121.70 million PRL, or 38.9% of everything mined through 15 September.

Pearl (PRL) at a Glance

What Is Pearl (PRL) and What Does Proof of Useful Work Mean?

Pearl is a standalone chain with its own coin, its own full node and its own miners. The Pearl blockchain's reference node is pearld, which started life as a fork of btcd, the Go implementation of Bitcoin. The repository credits that origin in its acknowledgments. Its wallet and its light client come from the same Bitcoin family of open-source code, so anyone who has read Bitcoin's node software will recognise most of the plumbing.

What changes is the work. In Bitcoin, miners burn electricity hashing block headers, and that hashing has no use outside the network. Pearl's design rests on a paper posted to arXiv on 14 April 2025, Proofs of Useful Work from Arbitrary Matrix Multiplication by Ilan Komargodski and Omri Weinstein, which describes a way to get a valid proof of work out of the matrix multiplication that GPUs already perform for AI training and inference. If you want the baseline first, our explainer on how proof of work secures a blockchain covers the original model.

The claim in the name is narrow, and it pays to keep it that way. Proof of useful work means the arithmetic a miner does for an AI model can double as the arithmetic that secures a block. It doesn't mean Pearl earns revenue from AI, and neither the paper nor the code says that it does.

The repository adds two pieces a trader wouldn't expect from a Bitcoin fork. It ships a zero-knowledge proof-of-work circuit, and it carries a post-quantum signature scheme called XMSS. Readers comparing this to other attempts at checkable AI computation can set it next to our guide to verifiable AI and cryptographic proofs.

How Pearl Mining Crypto Works on a GPU

Pearl mining crypto runs on graphics cards through a miner built on vLLM, the open-source engine many teams use to serve large language models. The repository's setup flow has four steps, from building the software and creating a wallet to starting the node and then starting the miner. Its Docker example loads a 70-billion-parameter Llama model tagged for Pearl, so the miner is serving a real model while it searches for blocks.

A gateway process runs between the node and the GPU. It talks to pearld over the node's JSON-RPC interface and exposes a mining interface to the model server, so the node never needs to know anything about the AI model doing the work.

That design keeps the security logic in the familiar place. Blocks still chain by hash, the heaviest chain still wins, and a miner still collects the block reward. The difference lives inside the proof, which our primer on how Bitcoin mining works makes easy to compare line by line.

The genesis block carries its own timestamp proof. Its first transaction carries the message "The native currency for machines and humans" and then commits to the hash of Bitcoin block 946,842, whose median time lands at about 06:15 UTC on 27 April 2026. That's a little under three hours before Pearl's genesis time of 09:00 UTC, so the genesis block could not have been built before that Bitcoin block existed.

The Pearl Coin Emission Curve and Its 2.1 Billion Cap

Pearl has no halvings. The block subsidy function in Pearl's node code pays a reward that falls a little with every block, and the total converges on 2.1 billion PRL.

Method: the reward at height h is 2.1 billion times K, divided by (h + K) times (h - 1 + K). The constant K is 650,226, the number of 194-second blocks in four years. Those rewards telescope, so the total mined through block H comes to 2.1 billion times H divided by (H + K), and half the supply exists at block 650,226.

The curve front-loads by construction. Block 1 paid about 3,229.6 PRL and block 113,770 paid about 2,339.4 PRL, so the reward had fallen by roughly 28% in 141 days of chain history. Every pearl coin reward paid in the first hour of the network was larger than any block reward that follows.

The same formula tells you where supply goes next. At the designed pace of one block every 3 minutes 14 seconds, the 536,456 blocks between the 15 September close and block 650,226 take about 3.3 years, and the second 1.05 billion PRL fills the curve's long tail after that.

How 40,000 Blocks in Six Days Front-Loaded the Supply

The formula assumes blocks arrive every 194 seconds. The launch ignored that assumption for about a week, and the explorer shows why.

Pearl's block explorer prints a difficulty of 1 at block 1, stamped 09:00 UTC on 27 April. Block 10,000 landed at 18:42 UTC the same day, 9 hours 42 minutes after genesis, and block 40,000 landed at 06:31 UTC on 3 May. Those first 40,000 blocks averaged about 12.7 seconds each, roughly 15 times faster than the target. By block 40,000 the explorer's difficulty had climbed to about 182,829, which is under 1% of the roughly 21.4 million it printed at block 113,770.

Pearl's difficulty rule moves slowly by design. It adjusts difficulty with an exponential filter whose half-life is one week, so the network needed days to price in the GPU power that arrived on launch day. Miners kept finding blocks at low difficulty the whole time, and the emission curve paid them its highest rewards for each one.

The table below shows what that did to supply, and you can reproduce every row from the formula and the explorer heights.

The chain ran 141.6 days from genesis to the 15 September close and produced 113,770 blocks, an average of about 107.6 seconds a block. At the 194-second target it would have reached block 63,074 or so, with 185.69 million PRL mined. So the fast early blocks put roughly 127 million extra PRL into existence ahead of schedule, about 41% of the 312.72 million on the books at the close.

The pace has settled. Blocks 110,000 (7 September, 14:16 UTC) through 113,770 averaged about 192.5 seconds, within 2 seconds of the target. The difficulty printed at block 100,000 and at block 113,770 differs by under 2%.

What to watch: the explorer stamps block times to the minute, so every sub-minute figure above is approximate. The block heights and the emission formula are exact.

How Big Is the Pearl PRL Supply Gap?

The Pearl PRL supply has two published counts, and the gap between them is large. By the code, 312.72 million PRL existed at block 113,770. CoinGecko's circulating count on 16 September was 255,045,783 PRL. You can rebuild the first number yourself from the formula above. The second comes from the tracker alone.

That leaves 57.67 million PRL, about 18.4% of the mined total, outside CoinGecko's figure. The cause is unproven, and this page reports the gap without assigning it a reason. Our explainer on circulating supply against total supply walks through why that distinction moves valuations.

It moves this one by about $32 million. At the 15 September close of $0.559694, the code's 312.72 million PRL rebuilds to a value of $175.03 million, against the $142.75 million CoinGecko prints on its own count.

What Has the Pearl PRL Price Done Since June 2026?

CoinGecko's Pearl PRL price series starts with a 00:00 UTC print on 22 June 2026 at $0.559446, the close of 21 June. The 15 September close came in at $0.559694 on the 16 September print, so the coin finished up 0.04%, almost exactly where the series began.

The path between those two points was anything but flat. The highest close in the series is $0.689097 on 24 June, and the lowest is $0.230167 on 22 July. From that July low, the 15 September close stands 143.2% higher and 18.8% under the June high.

Reported volume on the 15 September close was about $1.13 million. CoinGecko's ticker list on 16 September showed three centralised venues quoting PRL across four trading pairs, and one venue carried about 91% of reported volume.

Nearly all price discovery happens on that one venue, which matters more than any chart pattern on a coin this size. If you're reading a Pearl chart for an entry, you're reading one order book, and a single large seller there can move the print further than the same order would move a coin with several deep markets.

Risks of Holding Pearl (PRL)

The first risk is the ticker, which at least three projects use. Phemex's own product list gives its PRL currency the name Perle, and a search for "PRL" returns other coins' charts and other coins' supply figures. Pearl's CoinGecko id is pearl-2, and that's the id to check against.

The second is the front-loaded supply itself. Whoever ran GPUs in Pearl's first week collected a disproportionate share of the coins in existence, and the explorer shows their addresses without showing who controls them. Coins mined at launch can reach the market on any day, with no vesting calendar to warn you.

The third is the venue concentration described above, and the fourth is the unexplained 57.67 million PRL gap between the code and the tracker. The AI story around the coin also invites comparisons to compute networks that sell GPU time for revenue, the model our analysis of decentralized physical infrastructure networks breaks down, and Pearl's code shows no such revenue line.

Can You Trade Pearl (PRL) on Phemex?

No. Phemex lists no Pearl market of any kind. The PRL ticker that appears in Phemex's product data belongs to Perle, a different project, and its PRL/USDT perpetual and spot pair both carry Delisted status. None of that history is Pearl's.

If you trade the AI-mining theme on Phemex, you'll be doing it through the coins and contracts Phemex does list. Before you act on any PRL headline, check the project name and the CoinGecko id next to the ticker, because three different coins answer to those three letters.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who wrote the paper Pearl is based on?

Ilan Komargodski and Omri Weinstein are the two authors listed on arXiv 2504.09971. The Pearl repository itself was created on GitHub on 19 April 2026, five days after the paper's first anniversary and eight days before mainnet genesis.

What network ports does a Pearl node use?

A mainnet node listens for peers on port 44108 and serves RPC on port 44107, and the Oyster wallet server runs on 44207. Testnet shifts each of those by two.

Does Pearl have a testnet?

Yes. The repository defines a testnet and a second test network named Testnet2 alongside simnet and regtest, and its code stamps the testnet genesis block at 09:08 UTC on 30 June 2026.

Final Thoughts

Pearl's emission curve was written for 194-second blocks, and for its first week the chain ran at 13. That mismatch decided who owns the coin. Close to four in ten of the PRL mined by 15 September came out of 5.9 days of near-zero difficulty, and the curve paid its richest rewards in exactly that window.

The block pace has matched the design since early September. The ownership that fast week created stays on the chain, and it's the first thing to price on any Pearl chart.

Disclaimer: This article is for informational purposes only and is not financial advice. Cryptocurrency trading involves substantial risk. Always do your own research before making investment decisions.