Independent guide · not affiliated with Pearl Research Labs Independent Pearl guide Independent guide Checked Oct 20, 2026

Block 131,829
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Timeline

Pearl, from paper to network.

Every milestone, dated, with a source where one exists. Fork dates are the timestamps of their activation blocks, read from the chain; release dates are when GitHub published them.

Genesis
Apr 27, 2026
Forks
4
Releases
11
Block now
131,829
Now: block 131,829, with v1.5.2 the current release

October 2026

  1. Milestone

    On Coinbase’s listing roadmap

    Coinbase adds Pearl, as PEARL, to its listing roadmap. Not a listing: no trading date was given.

    Source

  2. Research

    An outside systematization

    “On Pearl Blockchain’s Proof of Useful Work: Systematization and Flexibility” proposes letting each miner choose its own noise level.

    Source

  3. Release

    v1.5.2

    Follows v1.5.1 (October 15, in-block transaction ordering) with a UTXO cache fix.

    Source

  4. Release

    v1.5.0 “Security hardening” and Wallet v3.0.0

    Security fixes reported by outside researchers; every operator told to upgrade, miners and pools first.

    Source

September 2026

  1. Release

    v1.4.11, then Wallet v2.0.7

    Fixes stuck light-client sends and incomplete transaction history, and drops the old pearlresearch.ai seeders. Wallet v2.0.7 shipped the same fixes on September 30.

    Source

  2. · 20:43 UTC · block 120,000

    Milestone

    Block 120,000

    Hard-coded as a checkpoint in v1.5.0 and Wallet v3.0.0.

  3. Release

    v1.4.8

    Peer discovery moves to seeders under pearlnetwork.net.

    Source

  4. Research

    FP8 specification

    The “Pearl Floating Point Scheme Specification”, presented on Pearl’s site as “The Pearl Protocol”, describes a future FP8 version of the proof.

    Source

  5. Development

    FP8 code starts on a development branch

    The fp8-scheme branch starts carrying code for certificate V4 (the FP8 scheme), and the work continues there into October. It isn’t on the master branch or in any release, and has no mainnet activation height.

    Source

  6. Release

    v1.4.6

    Security fixes, a higher minimum peer protocol version, and checkpoints up to block 100,000.

    Source

August 2026

  1. · 01:50 UTC · block 100,000

    Milestone

    Block 100,000

    Later hard-coded as a checkpoint in v1.4.6.

  2. · 12:03 UTC · block 99,000

    Fork

    Salted noise-seed hard fork

    Blocks move to V3 certificates. Every node, pool and miner had to upgrade to v1.4.1, published that morning; Wallet v2.0.5 followed in the afternoon.

  3. · 03:59 UTC · block 96,251

    Fork

    Rank-penalty soft fork

    From this block, a proof’s noise must reach a minimum rank, and its winning ticket must beat a target made stricter in proportion to that rank. Released as v1.3.0 the day before, with new bug-bounty tiers; v1.3.1, a testnet fix, followed that evening.

July 2026

  1. Release

    Pearl Desktop Wallet v2.0.4

    Fixes for wallets with many coins and for block validation, plus dependency security updates.

    Source

  2. Development

    PIP-3: floating-point certificates

    The first public proposal for a floating-point version of the proof, as a future hard fork. Still a draft, and the basis of the later FP8 work.

    Source

  3. · 10:57 UTC · block 91,630

    Fork

    Dense-only soft fork

    From this block, nodes reject MoE proofs again: only proofs of dense matrix multiplication count. Released as v1.2.1, activating the same morning.

  4. Release

    Pearl Desktop Wallet v2.0.3

    The wallet finds peers through DNS seeders, with an optional custom peer, and a second launch no longer breaks the running wallet.

    Source

  5. Release

    v1.1.6

    Cross-platform installers, oystercli (an interactive terminal wallet) and Go bindings for proof verification.

    Source

  6. Release

    v1.1.5

    MoE mining consistency fixes, Hadamard quantization support in the miner, and an overhaul of the RPC servers.

    Source

June 2026

  1. · 11:45 UTC · block 71,935

    Fork

    MoE hard fork

    Blocks move from V1 to V2 certificates, adding support for mining Mixture-of-Experts models. Existing miners kept working; nodes and pools’ proving code had to upgrade.

  2. Release

    Pearl Desktop Wallet v2.0.0

    Includes the MoE fork changes and pins the first mainnet checkpoint.

    Source

  3. Research

    The economics paper

    “The Economics of Proof-of-Useful-Work”, written by Rafael Pass, who lists Pearl Research Labs as his affiliation and wrote it while consulting for the company, models when rewards can grow useful compute without cheapening attacks.

    Source

  4. Research

    The usefulness-gap study

    An independent study of May 30–31 network activity argues the observed mining wasn’t useful AI work.

    Source

May 2026

  1. Partner

    Together AI endpoint

    Together AI announces a discounted, Pearl-powered Gemma inference endpoint.

    Source

  2. Release

    Pearl Desktop Wallet v1.0.0

    The first desktop wallet release.

    Source

April 2026

  1. · 09:00 UTC · block 0

    Network

    Mainnet genesis

    The genesis block is timestamped 09:00:00 UTC; block 1 follows a second later.

  2. Development

    The code repository is created

    The pearl-research-labs/pearl monorepo is created on GitHub.

    Source

March 2026

  1. Research

    Hawkeye paper

    A method for reproducing GPU-level floating-point behavior exactly, by researchers at Pearl Research Labs and Stanford, later central to the FP8 design.

    Source

April 2025

  1. Research

    The founding paper

    “Proofs of Useful Work from Arbitrary Matrix Multiplication” is published. Pearl’s repository names it as the protocol’s basis.

    Source

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