Pearl ($PRL) 101: what it is and how mining works
New to Pearl? This is the five-minute version: what proof of work means here, why blocks come every three minutes, and how difficulty and hashrate fit together.
Pearl ($PRL) is a proof-of-work network: miners race to find valid blocks, the winner takes the block reward, and every transfer settles inside those blocks. If you're going to read anything else on this site, the mining guides or the benchmarks, this is the background that makes them make sense. It's short, I promise.
Proof of work, the honest version
A block counts as valid when its hash lands below a target the network sets. There's no cleverness to finding one; it's trial and error, billions of attempts per second. The faster you can make attempts, the more often you win. That attempt rate is your hashrate, and it's the entire game.
Why blocks come every three minutes
Pearl aims for one block every 194 seconds. That's 3:14 on a clock, and the π wink is intentional; this chain was built by math people. Miners join, miners leave, and the network keeps adjusting difficulty so the average gap heads back toward the target. Which gives you a neat little tell: if average block times are running well under 194 seconds, more hashrate just showed up and difficulty hasn't caught up yet. In Pearl's first weeks that was true almost constantly, which is what a gold rush looks like in the data.
Difficulty and hashrate
Nobody can measure network hashrate directly, so it's estimated: take the difficulty, multiply by 2⁴⁸, and divide by how long blocks are actually taking. That's worth knowing because it's not Bitcoin's arithmetic (2³² and ten-minute blocks), and generic mining calculators that assume Bitcoin's constants will confidently give you nonsense for Pearl.
The coin itself
Mainnet went live on April 27, 2026, with no premine and no investor allocation; every PRL in existence was mined. Supply caps at 2.1 billion, released on a smooth declining curve rather than Bitcoin-style halvings, and the whitepaper is unusually readable if you want the cryptography. If you'd rather hold PRL than mine it, how to buy Pearl covers the exchange side.
Where to watch all this
Our block explorer runs against a full Pearl node we operate ourselves: live blocks and transfers, difficulty, estimated hashrate, mempool, and which pools are finding blocks. When we cite a number in an article, that's where it comes from, and you can go check it.
