How does Pearl work?

Pearl is money that no company runs.

There is no bank holding the accounts and no server you log in to. Instead, a network of ordinary computers keeps one shared record of who owns what, and every one of them checks the rules for itself.

This page walks through the whole idea once, start to finish. Each later page zooms in on one part.

What is Pearl, in one sentence?

Pearl is a shared ledger whose coins, called PRL, move only when their owners sign for them, and whose new pages are added by miners who prove they did a large amount of matrix math.

That sentence packs in five ideas: a ledger, coins, owners, pages and miners. Let’s take them one at a time.

Who keeps the ledger?

Picture a notebook that lists every payment ever made. Now picture that notebook copied onto computers all over the world, with every copy kept up to date.

Each of those computers is a node. Anyone can run one, because the software is free. A node receives new payments, checks them against the rules, and passes them on.

No node is in charge. If one tries to cheat, the others notice when they check its work, and they ignore it.

What is a coin, really?

There are no coin files. A PRL is an entry in the ledger that says, in effect, “this amount, locked so that only the owner of a certain key can spend it”.

Amounts are counted in grains. One PRL is 100,000,000 grains, the way a dollar is 100 cents. At most 2.1 billion PRL will ever exist.

How do you own coins?

Ownership comes down to one secret number, your private key. Your wallet picks it at random, and it is so large that nobody can guess it.

From the private key, your wallet computes a public key, and from that an address you can share, which looks like prl1p…. Coins sent to that address can only be spent with a signature made by your private key.

Think of the address as the slot of a mailbox anyone can drop coins into, and the private key as the only key that opens the box.

How do coins move?

To pay someone, your wallet writes a transaction: spend these coins of mine, and create new ones, some for my friend and the rest back to me.

It signs the transaction with your private key and hands it to a node, which checks it and passes it on. Within seconds most of the network has a copy, waiting to be recorded.

How do payments get into the ledger?

Waiting payments are collected into a block, a new page of the ledger. Pearl aims to add one block every 194 seconds, a little over three minutes.

Each block names the block before it by its fingerprint, called a hash. That chains the pages together. Change anything on an old page and its fingerprint changes, which breaks the link from every page after it. That’s why the whole ledger is called a blockchain.

Who gets to add the next block?

Anyone could try to write the next page, so Pearl needs a fair way to pick one writer at a time. It runs a lottery in which the tickets cost real work. The people and machines doing that work are miners.

In Bitcoin, the work is guessing: miners try an enormous number of guesses until one produces a lucky hash. That protects the network, but it’s useless for anything else.

Pearl’s work is matrix multiplication: multiplying big grids of numbers, the same math that runs AI models such as chatbots. Small patches of each answer become lottery tickets, and a ticket that comes in under the network’s target wins the block.

How does everyone know the work was done?

Redoing a miner’s multiplication to check it would take far too long. Instead, the winner sends a certificate along with the block: about 60 KB of proof that travels in front of it.

Inside is a zero-knowledge proof. It convinces any node that the winning ticket really came from honest matrix work, without revealing the matrices themselves. A node checks it in milliseconds.

What keeps the rhythm steady?

Miners join and leave all the time. Without an adjustment, blocks would speed up whenever more machines joined.

So after every block, Pearl retunes the difficulty: a little harder if that block came quickly, a little easier if it came slowly. The result is a steady heartbeat of about 194 seconds.

Where do new coins come from?

The winning miner is paid in two ways: the fees of the transactions it included, and brand-new PRL created by the block itself.

That new amount started at about 3,229.64 PRL in block 1 and shrinks a tiny bit with every block. The total creeps toward 2.1 billion but never quite gets there.

What happens to one payment, start to finish?

Here is the whole journey of a single payment, simplified.

Your wallet signs

It writes a transaction spending some of your coins and signs it with your private key.
Nodes check and share

Each node checks it, keeps it in a waiting room, and passes it on.
A miner wins a block

A miner includes your payment, multiplies matrices until a ticket wins, and attaches the certificate.
Nodes check the block

Every node verifies the transactions and the certificate, then adds the block to its copy.
Blocks pile on top

Each new block after yours makes your payment harder to undo.

Make a guess

Pearl has no company in charge. So who stops someone from spending the same coins twice?

Think of your answer first, then check it.

Answer Every node, on its own.

Each node keeps its own copy of the ledger and refuses any transaction that spends coins already spent. A miner who sneaks one into a block gets the whole block rejected, and loses the reward along with it.

Coin: PRL
Smallest unit: grain; 100,000,000 grains = 1 PRL
Maximum supply: 2.1 billion PRL
Target time per block: 194 seconds
Block header: 108 bytes; no nonce
First block: 2026-04-27

Next up: the network of nodes, and why nobody has to trust anybody.