Pearl is an independent public Layer-1 blockchain launched in April 2026 that uses Proof-of-Useful-Work (PoUW) to assign miners matrix multiplications used in neural-network inference instead of computations with no external purpose. Entropy recently spent 500 HYPE, worth around $45,000, in an acquisition involving the project. Pearl’s mainnet launched on April 27, 2026, with roughly 194-second blocks, NVIDIA GPU mining support, and a PRL supply cap of 2.1 billion. A Together AI partnership introduced inference priced more than 25% below standard market rates, subsidized by PRL emissions. Pearl published an FP8 scheme on September 14, 2026, as PRL later rose 67% in 24 hours to above $1.60. Empirical analysis, however, found that much of the network’s computing capacity was supporting unpaid workloads rather than paid AI inference.