You mine Pearl by running AI inference on your GPUs. The mining is extracted from the matrix multiplications the model is doing anyway — so instead of burning power on work with no purpose, your hardware produces an AI result and a chance at a block reward from the same operations.
What you need
- GPUs. Pearl mining runs through vLLM serving a large language model, so you need hardware capable of that. See Hardware requirements for mining.
- A Pearl node (
pearld) to connect to the network. - A wallet address to receive rewards.
- The vLLM miner — the two components that do the GPU work and talk to your node.
How rewards actually arrive
This is the part that surprises people coming from other systems.
You are not paid for uptime, for hashrate, or per hour. You're paid when your work finds a valid block. When that happens, you receive the full block reward — the newly issued PRL subsidy plus every transaction fee in that block.
That makes solo mining lumpy. You may mine for a long stretch with nothing, then receive a full block reward at once. Your expected earnings over time are proportional to your share of total network compute, but the variance around that expectation is large if your share is small.
Two ways to smooth it out:
- A mining pool, which shares rewards across participants. Not yet available — see Is there a Pearl mining pool?
- A compute package on the Pearl Compute Platform, where you buy a share of compute and receive proportional rewards without running hardware. See How compute package rewards are calculated.
What determines your earnings
| Factor | Effect |
|---|---|
| Your share of network compute | The dominant factor. As more GPUs join Pearl, your share of each block shrinks. |
| Network difficulty | Adjusts every block to hold the 194-second target. Rises as compute joins. |
| The issuance schedule | Block subsidy declines smoothly over time. See Does Pearl have halvings? |
| Transaction fees | Included in each block reward. Currently a small share of the total. |
| Your uptime | You can only win blocks while you're mining. |
Nothing you install can raise your rate. Rewards come from the protocol and your share of compute. Any tool promising higher returns is either mistaken or malicious — see Third-party mining software: why we don't endorse it.
Setting up, in outline
- Install the Pearl binaries —
pearld,prlctl,oyster, andoystercli. - Create a wallet and generate a Taproot receiving address. Record your seed phrase properly first — see Backing up your wallet.
- Start your node, passing your address with
--miningaddr. - Start the vLLM miner —
pearl-gatewayto bridge to your node, thenvllm-minerto do the GPU work.
Full commands are in What is the Pearl vLLM miner? and in the repository README.
Can I test without spending money?
Yes. Pearl runs testnet, testnet2, simnet, and regtest networks alongside mainnet. Start pearld with --testnet or --simnet to experiment without real funds. Recommended before committing production GPUs.
Can I mine with a CPU or an ASIC?
A CPU, no — not usefully. Pearl mining is GPU matrix multiplication at scale.
An ASIC, not economically. A chip built only to mine Pearl would give up the ability to do general useful work, and since Pearl's value comes from useful computation, that specialisation makes it less profitable than a GPU doing both jobs at once. This is Pearl's ASIC-resistance argument: economic rather than cryptographic.
Where to get help
Mining questions are best asked in our Discord, where other operators are. For bugs in the mining software, see Reporting a non-security bug.