About

Pearl is a Layer-1 blockchain that replaces hash-based proof-of-work with large-scale matrix multiplication, the core operation behind AI training and inference, so that GPUs securing the network simultaneously perform useful AI computation. Developed by Pearl Research Labs, the network retains Bitcoin's UTXO model and longest-chain consensus while its native asset, PRL, is mined as a by-product of verified GPU workloads.

History

Pearl was developed by Pearl Research Labs, co-founded by complexity theorist Omri Weinstein (Princeton PhD, affiliated with the Hebrew University, previously at NVIDIA and Vast Data). The project's whitepaper, published in April 2025, proposed a proof-of-useful-work (PoUW) consensus mechanism, implemented as cuPOW, in which miners produce valid blocks by generating verifiable proofs of matrix multiplications, wrapped in zk-SNARKs for cheap on-chain verification. The base layer is forked from Bitcoin's btcd codebase, retaining the UTXO model and longest-chain rule, with a fixed maximum supply of 2.1 billion PRL and a target block time of roughly 194 seconds. Emissions follow a polynomial decay curve rather than Bitcoin-style halvings.

Key events in the project's history include:

• April 2025: The Pearl whitepaper is published.
• April 27, 2026: Pearl mainnet launches.
• May 15, 2026: AI cloud provider Together AI announces an exclusive partnership, launching a discounted inference endpoint tied to the network. PRL's price and GPU mining profitability spike in the following weeks before declining as network difficulty rises.
• June 2026: PRL begins trading on centralized exchanges, including CoinEx, BigONE, and SafeTrade.
• July 2026: Pearl Research Labs joins the NVIDIA Inception program, building an accelerated inference platform targeting Hopper and Blackwell GPUs.