Pearl produces a block roughly every 194 seconds — about 3 minutes 14 seconds. Your transaction normally gets its first confirmation within one or two blocks, so a few minutes.
What a confirmation is
When your transaction is included in a block, it has one confirmation. Each subsequent block built on top adds another.
Confirmations matter because the chain settles probabilistically rather than instantly. Reversing a transaction would mean rebuilding every block after it and outpacing the rest of the network — which gets exponentially harder with each block added. More confirmations, more certainty.
Rough timings
| Confirmations | Approximate time |
|---|---|
| 1 | ~3 minutes |
| 3 | ~10 minutes |
| 6 | ~20 minutes |
| 10 | ~32 minutes |
These are averages. Block discovery is random, so an individual block may take much longer or arrive almost immediately. A gap of ten or fifteen minutes between blocks is normal variance, not a problem.
How many should you wait for?
It depends on the amount and who you're dealing with.
- Small amounts between people you trust — one confirmation is generally treated as settled.
- Larger amounts — wait for more. [[CONFIRM: state a recommended confirmation count for high-value transfers. Pearl's whitepaper contains no formal reorg-depth or finality analysis, so this number needs to come from the team rather than being inferred.]]
- Exchanges and services set their own requirements, often higher than what the protocol strictly needs. Check their published policy.
One thing worth knowing: Pearl launched with deliberately low mining difficulty, and network compute is still growing. On a young network, waiting for more confirmations on large transfers is a reasonable precaution.
Checking your confirmations
Look up your transaction on the block explorer:
https://explorer.pearlresearch.ai/tx/ followed by your transaction ID
The page shows the confirmation count directly. You can also look up your address at https://explorer.pearlresearch.ai/address/ followed by your prl1p… address to see confirmations for everything that touched it.
My transaction has no confirmations yet
Unconfirmed but visible on the explorer means it reached the network and is waiting to be included in a block. Normally a matter of minutes. If the network is busy, a transaction with a low fee may wait longer — miners prioritise higher-fee transactions.
Not visible on the explorer at all means it never reached the network. Your PRL hasn't moved. See Sending PRL, and what to do when a send fails.
Why 194 seconds?
It's a trade-off. Shorter block times mean faster confirmations but more frequent competing blocks, which wastes work and weakens security. Longer times are more efficient but slower for users. Pearl's interval sits comfortably within safe propagation margins for a globally distributed network while being meaningfully faster than Bitcoin's ten minutes.
Difficulty adjusts every block to keep the average near target, so if network compute changes sharply, block times correct within days rather than weeks.
Read more
- How to verify your balance on the block explorer
- My deposit or reward hasn't arrived
- The Pearl whitepaper, Section 5.4