A new cryptocurrency called Pearl (ticker PRL), which secures its blockchain by running the matrix multiplication behind AI workloads instead of conventional hashing, has set off a short-lived GPU mining rush, with profitability tracker hashrate.no recently listing an RTX 5090 at roughly $33.80 a day in mining revenue. The coin launched its mainnet in late April 2026 and recently drew attention when AI cloud provider Together AI announced an exclusive partnership, but PRL's price and per-card returns are already dropping precipitously as more miners pile onto the network.
Pearl, built by Pearl Research Labs, uses a consensus mechanism it calls Proof-of-Useful-Work, in which the computation that secures the network is large-scale matrix multiplication, also used in AI training and inference.
