PRL Surges 300% as Pearl Gains Attention as 'AI Bitcoin'

Original | Odaily Planet Daily (@OdailyChina)

Author | Golem (@web 3_golem)

Over the past month, the GPU-mined coin Pearl (PRL) surged over 300% (from $0.33 to $1.40), sparking widespread attention in the global crypto community.

Overseas renowned KOL Ansem referred to Pearl as the "AI version of Bitcoin" in an interview, and crypto-native fund No Limit Holdings announced a long-term heavy position in Pearl. Dragonfly general partner Tom Schmidt praisedPearl’s approach in an interview.

At the recent Token2049 event, Pearl also became one of the hot topics. Luma showed that 164 people signed up for Pearl’s side event during Token2049, and DWF Ventures stated in their Token2049 review, “Pearl is the center of attention online, with both funds and retail investors actively discussing it.”

What is Pearl? In short, Pearl is an L1 protocol that aligns AI computing with GPU mining: users' GPUs simultaneously perform blockchain proof-of-work and generate the PRL token while handling AI training and inference workloads—this is known as Proof of Useful Work (PoUW).

In May of this year, rumors that Pearl had received investment from a16z sparked a mining frenzy within the Chinese community. Odaily Planet Daily provided a detailed overview of Pearl’s core mechanics, ecosystem projects, and mining tutorials at the time, and objectively assessed the project’s early-stage fundamentals, concluding that Pearl had already been overhyped by the market, with its technical capabilities and capital operations still unproven—investors should proceed with caution. （Recommended reading: Did a16z Scoop Up $1.5M in PoW Mining Gems? Pearl Ignites the Mining Community Again (With Practical Mining Guide)）

Subsequently, PRL dropped from its peak price of $1.7 to as low as $0.23. However, Pearl did not enter a death spiral; about four months later, the current price of PRL has returned to the level seen in May this year.

PRL price trend, source: pearl-otc

Various indicators suggest that Pearl does not appear to be a fleeting hype project. What actual development and commercial applications has Pearl achieved over the past few months? What changes have emerged in its ecosystem? Odaily Planet Daily will analyze these in this article for investor reference.

The most credible move Pearl has made in recent months is joining NVIDIA's AI startup ecosystem.

On July 15, Pearl officially announced its participation in NVIDIA Inception, NVIDIA’s free global startup accelerator program designed to support startups in AI, deep learning, data science, and accelerated computing. As of 2026, Inception has over 40,000 member companies.

Although the entry barrier for NVIDIA Inception is not as competitive as Y Combinator, and joining NVIDIA Inception does not guarantee investment or an official partnership from NVIDIA, it at least demonstrates that Pearl, an AI startup founded just five months ago, has earned NVIDIA’s recognition. Pearl openly stated that joining NVIDIA Inception was partly due to its cost-free nature and partly because other member companies running GPU clusters could potentially become Pearl’s customers in the future.

Meanwhile, Pearl’s AI inference platform is gradually opening up, compared to May when it only launched a Gemma-4-31B-it-Pearl endpoint in collaboration with Together AI, which recently completed an $800 million Series C funding round.

Currently, Pearl's Serverless Inference offers seven models, all compatible with OpenAI (streaming, tools, JSON mode, etc.). Pearl’s pricing is competitive compared to major platforms, with some models being cheaper—especially on Flash-tier models.

For example, the GLM-5.3-Flash model Pearl charges only $0.07 per million input tokens, while Fireworks AI’s input pricing is as high as $0.15 per million tokens—twice the price of Pearl.

Pearl's Serverless Inference Pricing

In July, Pearl also announced the upcoming launch of the Accelerated Inference Platform, which is currently in waitlist registration.

In addition to business expansion and implementation, Pearl is also continuously iterating on its protocol. Previously, Pearl was criticized for relying on integer-based matrix multiplication (Odaily Note: an AI large model training algorithm), whereas modern AI workloads predominantly depend on floating-point computations. In mid-September, Pearl officially announced the launch of a new, highly efficient floating-point PoUW solution, which will soon be deployed in production.

In addition, Pearl is building an AI privacy trust layer. In the field of AI inference, user privacy protection is increasingly being discussed and prioritized. Since Pearl L1 uses zero-knowledge proofs (zk-SNARKs), it is inherently well-suited to safeguard user privacy. When Pearl miners perform large-scale matrix multiplications, these matrices may contain private model data or user information. zk-SNARKs compress these complex computations into a small encrypted proof that reveals no information about the underlying matrices while still allowing the network to verify whether the miner has found a valid block.

Applying zero-knowledge proofs to AI privacy protection may also be one of Pearl's core narratives.

In summary, while the recent price increase of PRL over the past month appears to stem from overseas community promotion, it fundamentally results from the project team consistently delivering on its work.

According to Pearl block explorer data, approximately 16.3% of PRL (total supply: 2.1 billion) has been mined. At the current price of $1.40, PRL’s circulating market cap exceeds $470 million, with an FDV of approximately $2.9 billion.

Compared to May, Pearl’s total network hash rate increased from 19 EH/s to 50 EH/s, approximately 2.5 times, equivalent to over 170,000 4090 GPUs participating in mining; Pearl’s average block time is 180 seconds, still within the network’s original target range (194 seconds), but the block reward has decreased to 2,262.52 PRL per block, resulting in approximately 1.086 million PRL issued daily, valued at about $1.52 million at $1.40 per PRL.

Pearl network data

It’s clear that there isn’t enough buying pressure in the market to absorb this rate of issuance, but at this early stage, miners appear to prefer holding onto PRL rather than selling it.

After the token price increased, mining interest in PRL has continued to rise. Miners can mine using their own GPUs or choose to join a mining pool. Pearl previously supported users renting cloud GPUs on the platform for mining, but new package slots are currently not available.

In May, Odaily Planet Daily introduced Pearl ecosystem's mining pools in an article, but the fact is that after several months, most of these pools have shut down, with only pearlhash continuing to operate relatively stably. Therefore, for users wishing to participate in PRL mining long-term, the optimal choice remains solo machine mining.

But on October 11, Pearl community miner @YuChen posted that renting GPUs for mining PRL remains unprofitable even though PRL has risen to $1.4, listing the costs and returns for mining PRL with different GPUs (assuming an electricity cost of 1 yuan per kWh).

Pearl mining rewards and cost analysis, source: @YuChen

On October 11, Miner Compare also compiled the latest Pearl mining profits. At an electricity cost of $0.10/kWh, the daily net profit for mining PRL with a 5090 is approximately $10, and with a 4090 it is approximately $7.69—very close to the estimate by Pearl community miner YuChen. Miner Compare has also launched a Pearl Mining Profit Calculator for individual miners to use.

In addition to mining, users can also purchase PRL directly on the OTC platform pearl-otc or the exchange SafeTrade. On October 10, Aster launched perpetual contracts for Pearl, providing an option for users who only seek price exposure to Pearl; however, it is important to note that the Pearl contract price on the Aster platform is approximately $0.20 higher than the spot price.

Looking back at Pearl, the project was originally created with the goal of saving energy wasted by Bitcoin mining: “Instead of wasting resources on meaningless hash computations, why not use the same computing power for AI and have the chance to earn block rewards?”

From this perspective, Pearl is a native crypto project where large miners perform matrix multiplications primarily to compete for blocks, without actually connecting to real paying inference customers, resulting in substantial network computing power that generates no sellable AI output.

However, after months of development, Pearl is evolving into an AI project, with the team dedicating significant effort to operating and commercializing its AI inference platform. On the official website, there is even no longer a link to the Pearl network or mining instructions, and the mined tokens appear to have gradually become a byproduct of AI computation.

The core of Pearl is "one computation, two outputs," but currently, the PRL token cannot capture any of Pearl's AI commercial value—this may be the missing闭环 Pearl needs to complete in the future.