How to mine Pearl ($PRL): the complete GPU mining guide
A wallet, a GPU, the miner, and a pool. That's the whole setup. Here's how I'd do it from scratch, including the parts the official docs gloss over.
You need four things to mine Pearl: a wallet address, a GPU, the miner software, and somewhere to point it, meaning a pool or your own pearld node. None of it is hard, but a couple of steps have gotchas, so here's the whole thing in order, with the parts I'd actually pay attention to.
What you need before you start
- A Pearl wallet address. Rewards get paid on-chain, so it should be an address you hold the keys for.
- A GPU with INT8 tensor cores. Pearl's proof of work is int8 matrix multiplication, so tensor throughput is literally the thing you're selling.
- The Pearl miner itself, which ships with a gateway that talks to a node or a pool.
- A pool account, unless you want to run your own full node and mine solo. Most people shouldn't.
Get a wallet address first
The reference wallet is oyster. Install it, run oyster --create, and it walks you through a passphrase and a seed phrase. The seed is the only backup you get, so write it down somewhere that isn't a screenshot folder. Any receiving address from that wallet works as a payout target.
One thing I'd push back on: people love pointing miners at exchange deposit addresses. It works until the exchange rotates the address or holds a deposit, and then your payouts are in limbo. Mine to keys you control, move coins to an exchange when you actually want to sell.
Install the miner
The mining stack is three pieces: the miner (the GPU workload), pearl-gateway (moves jobs around), and pearld (the full node, which you only need for solo). The miner ships two GPU backends: a CUTLASS kernel tuned for data-center Hopper cards, and a portable one for consumer NVIDIA cards. That second one is what runs on our 5090s. Under the hood it's all big int8 matrix multiplies. Pearl's whole pitch is proof-of-useful-work anchored to GPU matmul.
Pool or solo?
This choice matters more than any tuning you'll ever do. Pearl targets one block every 194 seconds, network-wide, and your share of those blocks equals your share of network hashrate. With the network sitting in EH/s territory, a single GPU mining solo has an expected time-to-block measured in years. The math says you'll earn the same on average; reality says you'll probably quit before your first block. I wrote more about that variance problem in the pool article.
So: join a pool. The pools page on our explorer shows who's actually finding blocks over the last 24 hours: Pearl Fortune, PearlHash, LuckyPool, Hero Miners, AlphaPool, Kryptex and a few smaller ones. Worth knowing: the official pool takes 20% and only accepts H100 and H200 class cards, which is exactly why the community pools exist. Before you commit your hashrate, compare fees and minimum payouts, and sanity-check on the explorer that the pool is finding blocks at the rate it claims.
Start it up
Set the pool endpoint and your payout address in the miner config and start it. You'll know it's working within a few minutes: the log shows jobs coming in and shares going out, your pool dashboard starts crediting shares, and GPU utilization sits pinned near 100%. If any of those three isn't happening, the problem is almost always the endpoint URL or the address. Check those before you blame the miner.
Check the money actually arrived
Pool dashboards are useful, but they're the pool's accounting, not yours. Paste your payout address into explorer.mineaitokens.com and you'll see every payout as it lands on-chain. I wrote up how I track mined Pearl, covering what pool payouts look like versus solo rewards, and how to read block attribution.
What a block pays
A block is worth about 2,620 PRL right now, reward plus fees. The subsidy declines a little every block on a smooth curve toward the 2.1 billion cap, so there are no halving cliffs to time. The network produces roughly 450 blocks a day at the 194-second target, a bit more lately while difficulty catches up with incoming hashrate. Your expected daily take is your slice of network hashrate times the day's blocks times the reward. For what that's worth in dollars, PRL trades on pearl-trade.com; Lena covered the whole flow in how to buy Pearl. And the revenue side moves: Tom's Hardware pegged 5090 revenue at about $17 a day in early June, roughly half its launch-week rate. That slide is the difficulty math working as designed, and it's why efficiency decides who's still mining next year.
Hardware notes
Since the work is int8 GEMM, what matters is sustained INT8 tensor throughput, not gaming benchmarks or FP32 TFLOPS. Data-center Hopper cards with the official kernel get to hundreds of effective TOPS at large matrix sizes. On my bench, an RTX 5090 tops out around 350 TOPS of INT8 matmul. Efficiency decides profitability more than raw speed though, which is why every benchmark we publish includes wall power. The test plan spells out exactly what we measure, and results land in Benchmarks as they're done.
Frequently asked questions
How much PRL do you get per block?
About 2,620 PRL at the moment, counting the block reward plus whatever fees are in it. The subsidy declines smoothly by design, and roughly 450 blocks get mined network-wide per day.
Can I mine Pearl with a CPU?
Not competitively, no. Tensor cores do int8 matmul orders of magnitude faster than any CPU. You'd be paying for electricity to lose a race.
Do I need to run a full node?
Only for solo mining. Pool miners just need the miner and the pool's endpoint.
Is solo mining worth it?
Same expected value as a pool, but the payout arrives as a rare jackpot you might wait months for. Unless you're running a warehouse of cards, use a pool. Here’s the math.
