No. Pearl has no halvings. PRL issuance declines smoothly and continuously instead of dropping by 50% overnight. If you're used to Bitcoin, this is one of the more meaningful differences in Pearl's design — and it's deliberate.
How Bitcoin's halving works
Bitcoin's block reward is cut in half at fixed intervals, roughly every four years. Issuance is flat between halvings, then falls off a cliff on a single block.
That creates two problems Pearl was designed to avoid:
- Incentive cliffs. Miner revenue halves overnight. Operations that were profitable the day before can become unprofitable immediately, which pushes hashrate — and therefore security — off the network in a lump.
- A thin tail. Repeated halving means issuance approaches zero fast. Long-term, block rewards become negligible and the network leans almost entirely on transaction fees.
How Pearl issues PRL instead
Pearl uses a smooth, continuously declining emission schedule. The reward is a little smaller in each block than the one before it — a gradual slope, not a staircase.
The fraction of total supply still unissued at any time follows:
R(t) = H / (t + H)
where t is the block height and H = 650,226 blocks. With Pearl's 194-second block time, H works out to about four years.
What that means in practice
| Time since launch | Share of total supply issued |
|---|---|
| 4 years | 50% |
| 8 years | ~67% |
| 12 years | 75% |
| 16 years | 80% |
Pearl's total supply is capped at 2.1 billion PRL.
The four-year figure looks familiar — why?
It's intentional. H was calibrated so Pearl's cumulative issuance at four years matches Bitcoin's: half the total supply.
You'll sometimes see H described as Pearl's "first halving time". That's an analogy, not an event. Nothing happens on that block. It's simply the point at which half the supply has been issued, reached gradually rather than at a step.
Why the smooth curve is better
No revenue shocks for miners
Your rewards decline by a fraction of a percent at a time rather than 50% on a single day. Mining economics stay predictable, and the network doesn't shed security in sudden waves.
A "fat but finite" tail
Pearl's issuance rate decays roughly like 1/t², so remaining supply decays like 1/t. In plain terms: issuance keeps going meaningfully further into the future than a halving schedule would allow, while total supply remains strictly capped. Block rewards continue to contribute to network security long-term instead of dwindling to almost nothing.
Less speculative distortion
Halvings are scheduled, publicly known supply shocks, and they invite speculation around the date. A continuous curve gives the market nothing to trade around.
What this means for you
If you're mining: expect your rewards to trend gently downward over time — that's the schedule working as designed, not a fault. In practice, changes in total network compute will affect your returns far more than issuance decline does. See How compute package rewards are calculated.
If you hold PRL: supply is capped at 2.1 billion, and new issuance slows continuously and predictably. There's no halving date to watch.
If someone tells you a Pearl halving is coming: they're mistaken, or they're using the word loosely. There is no halving event on Pearl. Be wary of anyone using a "halving" as a reason to buy, sell, or move funds.
Read more
The full emission schedule, including the exact per-block formula, is in the Pearl whitepaper, Section 5.4 and Section 6.