Pearl (PRL): A Proof-of-Useful-Work Chain That Mines With AI Maths
A Bitcoin-style GPU-mined chain launched in April 2026
Pearl is a Bitcoin-style mined blockchain whose mining work is the matrix multiplication AI actually uses, not meaningless hashing. Its mainnet opened in April 2026, and its own coin is PRL.
1. Who built it, and why
Pearl is developed by Pearl Research Labs and builds on a 2025 paper by Omri Weinstein, a theoretical computer scientist at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem who co-founded the company and is its CEO, and his colleague Ilan Komargodski. The mainnet started on 27 April 2026, and its node software is adapted from btcd, a Bitcoin implementation.
Bitcoin mining burns huge amounts of electricity for security, but the computation itself is useless elsewhere. Pearl’s ‘proof of useful work’ aims to use the same power and hardware for AI computation while securing the chain. On the Crypto Nation map, PRL stands in AI Valley, the valley of small mainnet coins in AI and computing.
2. Mining with matrix multiplication
AI training and inference (producing answers) are mostly giant matrix multiplications. Pearl miners perform this arithmetic on graphics processors (GPUs) and check whether small tiles of the result pass a target, like lottery tickets. To block shortcuts, inputs carry added noise and are committed in advance, and winning proofs are compressed with zero-knowledge proofs.
Blocks target about 194 seconds, and maximum supply is 2.1 billion PRL. Instead of Bitcoin-style halvings, the reward shrinks a little with every block, releasing about half the supply over several years. General smart contracts are not supported, only limited scripts such as conditional payments.
3. Uses and milestones
Pearl says PRL comes only from mining, with no investor allocation or pre-mine. The official miner supports Nvidia data-centre GPUs, and community-built miners also run on consumer graphics cards. After launch, hopes of earning while doing AI work set off a GPU mining rush and the nickname ‘AI Bitcoin’.
In May 2026 the AI cloud company Together AI launched a discounted AI model service funded partly by expected Pearl mining rewards. The white paper also proposes a marketplace for buying AI compute with PRL, but it is not live yet. Between June and August, consensus rules changed several times, including hard forks.
4. Things to know
The key question is whether the work is really useful. A June 2026 analysis by a researcher argued that most mining produced no AI output, and the reward system does not distinguish computation for real AI customers from computation done only for rewards. Partner companies are still few.
Many coins were mined in the first days, when difficulty was low, and analysts say early supply is concentrated in unidentified addresses. The developer effectively decides rule changes, no external audit of the node or proof circuits has been published, new coins are issued daily, and unrelated tokens also use the PRL ticker.
Written from information public up to October 2026. It does not recommend or rate any coin and is not investment advice. If something is wrong, please tell us through the contact page.