A new research preprint claims that Pearl, a Layer-1 blockchain marketed as turning cryptocurrency mining into useful artificial intelligence (AI) computation, is doing nothing of the sort, despite having recently triggered a GPU mining rush. The study estimates Pearl's network runs at roughly 24 exahashes per second (EH/s) — the equivalent of about 320,000 RTX 3090-class GPUs drawing an estimated 112 megawatts (MW) — all while producing "zero useful AI computation." Researchers saw a roughly 38% jump in budget GPU rental prices on the marketplace vast.ai go to Pearl mining, with utilization climbing from 57% to 94% after the mining software went public in May.
Instead of performing real inference or training, the paper, titled The Usefulness Gap in Proof-of-Useful-Work, says the network grinds through random matrix multiplications that merely take the shape of AI math. The self-billed “first empirical measurement of a deployed Proof-of-Useful-Work (PoUW) system” study argues that Pearl’s mining protocol verifies that miners performed matrix multiplication correctly, but does not verify whether that work came from real AI training or inference workloads.
