The genesis block

Every chain has to start somewhere. The first block has no parent to point to and no earlier blocks to check against, so nobody mines it. It is written straight into the node software, and every node starts from the same copy.

That is the genesis block, height 0. Pearl’s is dated 27 April 2026, 09:00:00 UTC. It pays no reward, carries a placeholder proof, and holds a short message: a summary of Pearl’s rules, followed by the hash of a Bitcoin block, to prove when it was made.

Try it

Here is the genesis header in the header explorer. Change any field and the hash no longer matches the one built into every node.

What’s in the genesis header?

The same six fields as any Pearl header, 108 bytes:

Hash those 108 bytes with SHA256d and reverse the result, and you get a18d3093b7ff618f0cdd073fa3d10374e2e0105fe7ef53ff48b55f41c58dadd7. That hash is hard-coded in pearld, and block 1’s previous-block field holds it.

What does its coinbase say?

The genesis block’s only transaction is its coinbase, 295 bytes:

Its scriptSig, 234 bytes, has three pushes:

The first seven bytes, 04ffff001d0104, are exactly how Bitcoin’s genesis coinbase begins. The text that follows is Pearl’s own.

What does the message mean, line by line?

Here it is in full:

The native currency for machines and humans. Total 2.1e9 Pearls, Cumulative emission h/(h+650226), WTEMA 3m14s 7d, Bitcoin block #946842 with MTP 1777270524 is 000000000000000000003a9221861ec7411427dd24f979fb91a3b8f7265e1dbc.

Broken into its five parts:

So the first block states, in one sentence, the three numbers that shape Pearl’s money: the cap, the curve and the clock.

Why quote a Bitcoin block?

To prove the genesis block is not older than it claims.

A block hash can’t be predicted before the block is mined. Bitcoin block 946,842’s hash, 000000000000000000003a9221861ec7411427dd24f979fb91a3b8f7265e1dbc, didn’t exist before that block was found. Pearl’s genesis coinbase contains it; the coinbase’s txid is the genesis Merkle root; and the genesis hash covers that root. So the genesis block, and everything after it, was made after Bitcoin block 946,842.

The research for this site checked that Bitcoin block on mempool.space:

Genesis is stamped 2 hours 44 minutes 36 seconds after the quoted median time, and about 2 hours 11 minutes after the Bitcoin block itself. It’s Satoshi’s newspaper-headline idea, updated: instead of a front page, the hash of a Bitcoin block.

What about the certificate?

Every Pearl block travels behind a mining certificate, and genesis has one too, but it’s a placeholder. It is a V1 certificate with the genesis block hash, 164 zero bytes of public data, and a 4-byte proof: deadbeef, labeled a “vanity proof” in the code.

It couldn’t be a real proof: there was nothing to mine on. And it doesn’t need to be, because nodes never verify genesis. Pearl’s code says it plainly: “Genesis blocks are never verified (hardcoded and trusted), only serialized.”

That’s also why the header’s proof commitment is all zeros. For any other block it would be SHA256d of the certificate version and public data. For this placeholder certificate that would be 1879296ca34cb1aa416a341f3b49dfd9516f48d36fcd5a2ad761c07030466d22, which doesn’t match the zeros, and doesn’t have to. The whole block, certificate, header, one-byte transaction count and coinbase, is 612 bytes: 208 + 108 + 1 + 295.

Can the genesis coins be spent?

There are none. The subsidy formula returns 0 for height 0, and the coinbase’s only output is worth 0 grains, locked by a bare OP_RETURN (6a), which nothing can ever unlock. The code adds a third guard: “the coinbase for the genesis block is not spendable”.

The first real reward came one second later, in block 1: 3,229.64134063 PRL. Pearl had no premine.

Do other networks share it?

Partly. Pearl’s regtest, simnet and signet reuse the mainnet coinbase and its message. Testnet and testnet2 use a different one, quoting 03/May/2024 and a different Bitcoin block hash, and paying 50 PRL to a dummy key. Each network has its own genesis block hash in pearld.

var genesisBlock = wire.MsgBlock{
	MsgHeader: wire.MsgHeader{
		MsgCertificate: wire.MsgCertificate{
			Certificate: &wire.CertificateV1{
				Hash:      genesisHash,
				ProofData: []byte{0xde, 0xad, 0xbe, 0xef}, // Vanity proof for genesis block
			},
		},
		BlockHeader: wire.BlockHeader{
			Version:    1,
			PrevBlock:  chainhash.Hash{},
			MerkleRoot: genesisMerkleRoot,        // 302f59c6…371675c1
			Timestamp:  time.Unix(1777280400, 0), // 2026-04-27 09:00:00 +0000 UTC
			Bits:       0x1b00ffff,
		},
	},
	Transactions: []*wire.MsgTx{&genesisCoinbaseTx},
}