L2 Cools Down, PoW+AI Rises? Analyzing TOKEN2049's Focus Project Pearl

Author: Bitcoin Orange Trader

L2 projects are facing shutdowns, while PoW is gaining traction: What are foreigners really discussing about the $PRL at TOKEN2049?

Recently, several PoW projects have emerged just as L2 projects like Blast and Abstract are shutting down one after another.

During TOKEN2049, one project that garnered significant discussion among foreigners is Pearl ($PRL). After researching, I found that its team, technology, and funding behind it are indeed substantial, and it is attempting to solve a long-standing problem: Can AI computing power be utilized to mine a currency similar to Bitcoin?

So, what exactly does PRL do?

It is an independent PoW public chain set to launch on April 27, 2026, utilizing Proof of Useful Work (PoUW). While Bitcoin miners perform SHA-256 hashing to compete for block rewards, Pearl replaces mining work with matrix multiplication, which is heavily used by AI large models.

If an AI company is already using GPUs for inference for clients, the same batch of computations can also participate in Pearl mining, earning PRL rewards.

Ideally, a single GPU can earn money from both AI clients and mining, allowing miners to earn more while AI service providers can use part of the profits to lower prices.

The team background is one of the biggest advantages for PRL.

CEO Omri Weinstein is a Princeton computer science PhD and associate professor at Hebrew University, previously teaching at Columbia University, with experience at NVIDIA and VAST Data.

Another co-founder, Ilan Komargodski, is an associate professor of cryptography at Hebrew University and holds a PhD from the Weizmann Institute of Science, having conducted research at Cornell Tech and NTT Research.

The third co-founder, Idan Sugarman, has a background in business and investment, and Cornell cryptography researcher Rafael Pass is also involved in economic security research.

The core team has long studied computational complexity, cryptography, and verifiable computing, publishing the original PoUW paper in 2025, indicating that the technology is not a last-minute attempt to ride the AI wave.

There has also been substantial progress in commercial applications.

On May 15 of this year, Together AI officially announced a partnership with Pearl Research Labs to launch the Gemma-4-31B-it-Pearl inference service, reducing the inference price of this model by over 25% through mining subsidies.

Pearl has also built an inference platform compatible with OpenAI API, supporting open models like GLM and DeepSeek, allowing users to recharge in USD and charge based on token consumption.

Clients, products, and charging mechanisms are in place, but currently, there is still a lack of key data such as real paid revenue, daily inference volume, and customer retention, making it impossible to prove that this business has scaled successfully.

Now, who is supporting it?

No Limit Holdings (NLH) has publicly stated that it is actively accumulating PRL, with investor Brian Breslow publishing a lengthy study in September, calling Pearl a potential next-generation Bitcoin and even suggesting a future target price above $30.

The key figure at NLH, Gin Chao, previously served as the Chief Strategy Officer at Binance and is a board member of BinanceUS, indicating that the funding circle that supports PRL does have some background, but this should not be interpreted as Binance investing in or endorsing Pearl.

PRL does not have traditional VC token rounds or pre-mined allocations; early chips were mainly generated through GPU mining, and subsequently circulated through third-party OTC markets like Pearl OTC and Black Pearl OTC.

The Pearl OTC website reports a cumulative transaction volume of approximately $31.5 million, and spot trading has already appeared on exchanges like BigONE and SafeTrade.

The total supply of PRL is capped at 2.1 billion tokens, with no conventional team pre-mining or VC unlocks; the issuance method is a smoothly decreasing block reward, without the sudden halving seen in Bitcoin every four years.

The issue is that the early mining difficulty was very low, with approximately 121.7 million tokens mined in about 5.9 days initially, accounting for about 36% of the currently circulating supply, and it is not transparent how much the team and early miners received.

Based on a reference price of about $1.28 on October 8, the circulating market cap is approximately $430 million, with FDV nearing $2.7 billion, and theoretically, about 1 million PRL are still being added daily, meaning the potential selling pressure from continuous mining cannot be ignored.

There is also a significant controversy regarding the technology:

Pearl can prove that miners have indeed completed matrix calculations, but it cannot prove that these calculations necessarily come from real paying AI clients.

In June of this year, a study observed miner software and actual mining behavior, finding that a large amount of computation could be completed using random matrices, without any need for someone to purchase inference services.

The project's logic is that miners truly servicing AI clients will have two sources of income, while pure miners will only receive token rewards, and as competition increases, the cost advantage of the latter will disappear.

This economic model makes sense, but it has yet to be validated by large-scale real commercial data.

The MoE mining vulnerability that emerged in July also reminds us that consensus implementation is still in its early stages, and the FP8 upgrade supporting broader AI workloads still needs to be validated on the mainnet.

Currently, Pearl's inference platform primarily accepts USD, with miners earning client payments and PRL rewards, but there are no confirmed large-scale income dividends or mandatory buyback and burn mechanisms for the token.

Scaling the business can improve miner economics, enhance network security, and boost market confidence, but whether AI demand can continuously convert into direct buying pressure for PRL will depend on the future presence of real token payments, holding settlements, collateral, and reserve demand. Otherwise, even if inference revenue grows, the token price may still be diluted by continuous mining issuance.

The death wave of L2 indicates that the market does not need so many redundant chains, while projects like PRL are attempting to find a new path for PoW. PoW+AI has the opportunity to become an important narrative moving forward, but ultimately, what will determine how far PRL can go is whether AI companies are willing to pay for this computing power in the long term.

Being able to mine coins with AI computing power is a technology, but making this coin a truly needed asset in the market is a big business.

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