# Pearl status: what is live, in development, and still unverified

https://www.learnpearl.org/news/pearl-status-october-19-2026/ · October 19, 2026 · Status

Nearly six months after genesis, the software is hardening fast. The number that would prove the thesis still isn’t published.

## The verified snapshot

- Mainnet has run since April 27, 2026, and passed block 130,000 on October 19.
- The current core release is v1.5.2 (Oct 17, 2026), a fix on top of v1.5.0 “Security hardening”, which every operator was told to install as soon as possible.
- The current desktop wallet is v3.0.0 (Oct 13, 2026).
- Pearl Research Labs’ website now leads with a commercial inference platform: a serverless API plus managed and on-premise deployments.
- Together AI’s Pearl-powered Gemma endpoint, announced in May, is still presented on Pearl’s network page.
- An FP8 version of the protocol is specified and in development. It is in no release and has no activation height.

## What changed since August

September and October were about hardening. v1.4.6 raised the minimum peer version and added checkpoints; v1.4.8 moved peer discovery to new seeders; v1.4.11 fixed wallet sends. Then v1.5.0 bundled a batch of security fixes reported by outside researchers, and v1.5.1 and v1.5.2 followed within four days.

There were no new forks after August’s salted noise-seed hard fork at block 99,000. The development branch, meanwhile, gained code for a fourth certificate version built on FP8 arithmetic.

## The number that is still missing

No explorer, coin price or total-work figure answers Pearl’s central question. The defining metric is the independently verifiable share of network work attached to genuine training or inference.

The only published measurement, a study of late May, predates four protocol changes. Until a new one appears, “proof of useful work” is a safer description of what the protocol can do than of what all observed mining does.

## Sources

- [Official Pearl releases](https://github.com/pearl-research-labs/pearl/releases) (Pearl Research Labs, primary)
- [Pearl v1.5.2 release notes](https://github.com/pearl-research-labs/pearl/releases/tag/v1.5.2) (Pearl Research Labs, primary)
- [Pearl v1.5.0 “Security hardening” release notes](https://github.com/pearl-research-labs/pearl/releases/tag/v1.5.0) (Pearl Research Labs, primary)
- [Pearl Desktop Wallet v3.0.0 release notes](https://github.com/pearl-research-labs/pearl/releases/tag/pearl-wallet-v3.0.0) (Pearl Research Labs, primary)
- [Pearl Research Labs website](https://pearlresearch.ai) (Pearl Research Labs, primary)
- [Pearl network page](https://pearlresearch.ai/network) (Pearl Research Labs, primary)
- [The Usefulness Gap in Proof-of-Useful-Work: An Empirical Study of Pearl’s cuPOW Protocol (arXiv 2606.04819)](https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.04819) (arXiv, independent)