Why we are building a Pearl mining pool
Solo mining against EH/s of competition is a lottery ticket, even on a chain that pays every three minutes. We're building the pool we wanted to join.
The problem with going solo
Your expected time to find a Pearl block solo is (network hashrate / your hashrate) × 194 seconds. Plug in real numbers, with the network running in the EH/s range, and a single machine is looking at weeks or months per block, on average. And that average is doing a lot of work in that sentence: you can run twice your expected time without one block, then catch two in an afternoon. The earnings are real. The schedule is a coin flip.
What a pool actually changes
A pool aims everyone at the same block candidates and splits each reward by work contributed, counted in shares. Your expected earnings don't improve; they're the same as solo, minus the fee. What changes is variance: instead of waiting a month for 2,620 PRL all at once, you collect a small slice of every block the pool finds. Same money, survivable schedule. For a small miner that's the whole difference between mining being viable and not.
Where ours stands
We already run a full Pearl node and the indexer behind the explorer, and we mine ourselves, so the pool is us building infrastructure we already half-operate. The remaining work is the pool-specific plumbing: the stratum endpoint, share accounting, and payout processing. I'm not going to promise a date and then miss it; what I'll promise is that the announcement lands here first, and that the explorer's pools page will track our blocks the same way it tracks everyone else's. No special treatment for the house.
