Mining Coin's “Practical” Disguise: Can Pearl's AI Hashrate Narrative Escape the Death Spiral?
Author: Wenser
Original title: VVV surged more than 10 times during the year, and the base ecosystem became the last hope for cryptographic AI?
Every year, one or two mining coins come out of nowhere in the crypto market, rekindling the mood in the mining community. The projects that appeared this year are calledPearl(Chinese name “pearl”).
On April 27th, the Pearl mainnet went live quietly, but it didn't attract attention until this week of January. The cause was a Pearl community member on May 27th@optimistSpeaking on the X platform, a wallet suspected to be linked to a16z has quietly hoarded over $1.5 million worth of Pearl network tokens PRL. After the news broke, the PRL token price rose from around $0.6 to above $1.5, a 2-day increase of more than 150%.
Webcast a16z linked wallets to store PRL
However, it is still uncertain whether this wallet actually belongs to a16z. Most likely, it is news deliberately hyped up and spread by the community to raise the Pearl community's attention. What is certain, however, is that a16z did connect with the project: on January 26, 2026, a16z crypto research published an article introducing the founder of PearlOmri WeinsteinThe proposed PoUW algorithm is at the core of the Pearl network (Odaily note: this article has been deleted).
Practical Proof of Work (PoUW): combines AI inference tasks with mining
Pearl's core model is still that users use miners (GPUs) to mine coins. The network design is similar to the Bitcoin blockchain, but its unique feature is that it proposes a new proof of work mechanism — Practical Proof of Work (PoUW) — based on POW.
In the past, in POW blockchains, miners mainly used computers to solve cryptographic problems to ensure network security. This kind of calculation was often criticized as meaningless computation — there is no other use other than to ensure blockchain security. In particular, under the current wave of AI, it also wastes valuable computing power resources.
In order not to waste computing power, Pearl's PoUW abandoned the SHA-256 algorithm and used matrix multiplication (matMUL/GEMM) in AI calculations. The computing resources contributed by users' GPUs to the Pearl mainnet will not only be used to protect Pearl's network security, but also execute AI workloads and provide AI training and inference services for large model makers, thereby truly generating value. From this perspective, the tokens produced by mining are actually rewards for users providing computing power to participate in AI computation.
Pearl's PoUW is called practical because it enables GPUs to achieve blockchain proof of work and generate tokens while AI training and inference workloads. Currently, Pearl has collaborated with the big model training platform Together AI to launch the Gemma-4-31B-IT-Pearl endpoint (the bottom layer is Google's Gemma 4 31B model), and developers will also get a 25% discount when using the endpoint, which is subsidized by the PRL tokens they have mined.
The tokens produced by the Pearl network are PRL, with a total supply of 2.1 billion, and the average block generation time set by the network is 194 seconds. However, the number of tokens produced by the Pearl network per block is not fixed, and there is no mechanism for halving, but is determined by an issuance curve. One of the core formulas of this curve is A (t) = t/(t + H), A (t) is the cumulative distribution ratio of tokens, t is the current block height, and H is a fixed value of 650226 (block height corresponding to four years).
The amount of tokens each block will produce can be estimated based on the PRL cumulative distribution ratio. Of course, as a regular user, we can go directly to Pearlblock explorerView information such as the current total token output, number of block rewards, block height, and average block generation time. There is no need to calculate it yourself.
As shown above, currently over 8.8% of PRL tokens have been mined, and at the same time, if calculated at a price of 1.65 US dollars, the market value of PRL in circulation has also exceeded 300 million US dollars.
A complete introduction to mining and ecology
Under the current crypto market conditions, the PRL market value may seem a bit overvalued, but this is also due to the increase in mining costs. Pearl not only supports users to use their own GPUs for mining, but also allows users to directly rent cloud GPUs for mining on this platform. As shown below, Pearl has launched 3 packages, all of which have already been sold out due to the popularity of the project.
The mining costs for these three packages are not cheap. Take package 1 as an example. If you can rent 1000 TH/s for 10 consecutive days for $1,099, the cost of renting 1000 TH/s for an hour is about $4.57. Community members@AKAKAY04I made a simplePRL mining cost estimatorBy substituting the hourly cost and computing power of Pearl Package 1, the average cost of each PRL discovered is $1.51-1.77, which is close to the market price of PRL. Even with the purchase of package three, the PRL cost was only reduced to $1.33-1.56.
Therefore, if you want to participate in Pearl network mining and make money, you must rent GPU computing power that is cheap enough. Currently, the community recommends many rental platforms such as Runpod and VasTAi. The price of 4090 and 5090 video cards ranges from 0.5-2 US dollars/hour.
Once the rental card is successful, users can choose to join the Pearl mining pool to participate in mining. Currently, Pearl Ecology has four main mining pools, which arepearlhash, alphapool,Akoya、Mineprl, community members@peterdai111The characteristics of these four mining pools are summarized, and users can select after evaluation. (Odaily note: ask AI or refer to community members for specific procedures@0xtonixie(Written tutorial)
It's only been a month since Pearl went live on the main network. As for a new project, its ecological development is quite complete. In addition to spontaneously launching mining pools and block explorers, the community also has gameplay such as cross-chain bridges, OTC platforms, and NFTs.
PearlBridgeIt is the first Pearl Network cross-chain bridge project. It allows users to lock in native PRL tokens and mint WPRL 1:1 on Ethereum. The project party charges a 0.5% deposit fee (minimum 4PRL), and there is no processing fee for exchange. Currently, the project has locked over 320,000 PRLs, and WPRL users on the EVM chain can freely trade on OKX Web3 wallets or other DEXs.
Users can alsoPearl-otcThe platform sells native PRL tokens on its own. The platform is a non-custodial trading platform. USDC is directly transferred between the buyer and seller's wallets, and PRL is stored in a “2-of-2” multi-signature escrow account co-signed by the seller, and the platform cannot transfer funds unilaterally. The platform is currently the main reference platform for PRL prices. It has strong liquidity, and can also view PRL's price fluctuation curve
PRL's price fluctuation curve
On May 23, the crypto exchange SafeTrade also launched PRL, but the trading platform is small and not well known, so if users trade PRL on this platform, they need to pay attention to financial security.
A mine coin flywheel that is no longer “invisible”
One of the default rules in the mining community is that no matter how innovative the minecoin model is, the core logic is always “mining and selling.” POW mining is essentially a math game. There are only cold machines, precise input-output calculations, and the greed to squeeze the last hint of profit before the crash. It's not a regular project token, because it has no fundamentals of value, nor is it a meme, because there is no attention or cultural consensus.
As a result, the flywheel effect of mining coins has long ceased to be invisible. “Miners mine tokens — design and buy drives — token prices rise — there is a wealth effect — more people are willing to mine.” The core that supports this model is always the existence of buying orders, but there is no permanent motivation in this world, and the market cannot have unlimited purchases. It can be said that mining coins are a train that runs to a cliff from the beginning. Everyone can see it, and they always believe they will get off at the last minute.
In the past, some mining coin projects used the “self-mining” method to create false demand in the market. Their main profit did not rely on selling coins, but instead made money for users to buy mining machines, but when market making costs were higher than mining machine profits, this model also collapsed.
Looking at Pearl, there are opinions that it is not just a mining coin, but an opportunity to grow into the next Bittensor Trust (TAO). Because Pearl is the biggest difference from past mining projects, the computing resources it consumes are not only used to price PRL, but actually provide AI training and inference services for large model makers in the physical world. This is the value of Pearl's practical POW, so Pearl is more like a DePin project.
However, judging from the current development progress of the project, this value is more of a gimmick. Because the current core implementation of the Pearl network is based on accurate integer matrix multiplication, modern AI workloads (especially large model training) are not performed in an INT (integer) environment, but rely on low-precision floating-point formats, and extending the current PoUW mechanism to floating-point data types is technically challenging.
Therefore, whether Pearl can break out of the death spiral of mining coins in the future requires real technical strength, capital, and actual institutional support and platform, not just today's “infinite imagination” of a16z.
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