How Pearl works

1. 01

   A wallet creates a transaction

   It picks spendable outputs, names the new outputs (the payment, plus change back to you) and signs with your key.

2. 02

   Nodes check and relay it

   Every node checks the transaction against the rules before passing it on. Valid ones wait in the mempool.

3. 03

   A miner builds a candidate block

   It picks pending transactions, usually the best-paying ones, and commits to the block’s contents.

4. 04

   Matrix work becomes a certificate

   The miner’s matrix multiplication produces lottery tickets. A winning ticket is turned into a compact block certificate.

5. 05

   The network verifies the block

   Nodes check the transactions, the certificate, the difficulty target and the link to the previous block.

6. 06

   More blocks add confidence

   The block that includes the transaction is its first confirmation, and each later block makes it harder to reverse.

Matrix multiplication is the core arithmetic of AI training and inference: every layer of a model multiplies a grid of inputs by a grid of learned weights. GPUs are built to do it at enormous scale.

Pearl’s thesis is that a network doesn’t need a separate fleet of machines computing throwaway hashes if valuable matrix multiplication can supply the proof of work instead. Try one below: pick any cell of the result to see where it comes from.

If a miner could get the answer without doing the multiplication, the proof would be worthless. Pearl’s INT whitepaper, building on a 2025 paper (opens in a new tab), combines five ingredients to prevent that:

1. 01

   Noise first

   Before multiplying, the miner adds random low-rank noise to both matrices (low-rank means built from a few simple patterns). The noise is derived from the miner’s commitment to its matrices and from the chain, so the miner can’t choose it, and skipping the real multiplication saves nothing.

2. 02

   Commit to the work

   The miner commits to a record of the computation as it happens, so the final answer alone can’t stand in for the work.

3. 03

   Lottery tickets

   Hashes of that committed computation act as lottery tickets. A ticket below the difficulty target wins the block.

4. 04

   Remove the noise

   Because the noise is low-rank, the miner can subtract it cheaply afterwards, and the useful result comes back intact.

5. 05

   Prove it compactly

   The winning work is compressed into a zero-knowledge proof of at most 65,000 bytes that travels with the block as its certificate.

Nodes follow the valid chain with the most accumulated work. Pearl aims for one block every 194 seconds. Its WTEMA difficulty rule nudges the target after every block, depending on how long that block took, smoothed over a one-week time constant.

Miners receive newly issued PRL plus transaction fees. When more work joins, blocks come faster and difficulty rises to slow them back down, so a miner’s share of the rewards depends on its work compared with everyone else’s.

Target interval

194 seconds

Exact in the chain parameters

Difficulty

Every block

WTEMA, one-week time constant

Coinbase maturity

100 blocks

Before new PRL can be spent

Fee market

First price

Highest fee rate first, no burn

Pearl caps supply at 2.1 billion PRL. Instead of Bitcoin’s sudden halvings, the reward shrinks a tiny amount with every block. The curve is tuned so about half the supply is issued in the first four years. After that, issuance keeps slowing: the total creeps toward 2.1 billion but never quite reaches it.

Total supply

2,100,000,000 PRL

Four-year scale

650,226 blocks

Reward at block 131,829

2,232.59 PRL

Chain height on Oct 22, 2026

Pearl’s rule changes have so far activated at fixed block heights written into the software, not by miners signaling support. Below a given height one set of rules applies; from that height, the new set does. Operators have to upgrade before the height arrives.