Pearl ranks #36 of 508 cryptocurrencies. On a list that also counts tokens, memecoins, wrapped coins, staked derivatives and stablecoins it appears at #97: 61 of the 96 assets ahead of it are not native coins but tokens or claims. A token is issued on a host blockchain rather than running its own; a claim stands for an asset already counted. Of the 84 non-native assets CoinSpectrum lists above it by market cap, about 56% are claims on other assets, 39% are tokens and 5% are memecoins.
| CoinSpectrum Grade | A · 78/100 · provisional |
|---|---|
| Rank among cryptocurrencies | #36 |
| Rank counting claims | #97 |
| Market capitalisation | $577M |
| Price | $1.60 |
| Circulating supply | 360,845,432 PEARL |
| Maximum supply | 2,100,000,000 PEARL |
| Consensus family | Proof of Work |
| Consensus mechanism | Proof-of-Useful-Work (AI GPU matrix-mult) |
| Own hashrate | 72 EH/s |
| Ledger type | Single-asset ledger |
| Launch distribution | No premine |
Market figures from the 28 October 2026 build. Open the live view for every exchange's price, and charts.
A — 78 out of 100, provisional (from 14 of 17 criteria, 28 October 2026 build). With what is not yet measured anywhere from nothing to full marks, the score would be 64 to 85 (B to A+).
| Criterion | Score | Basis |
|---|---|---|
| Leading Consensus Mechanisms (Source) | 10 | group average |
| Consensus: leader ladder | 10 | Proof of work: 10 of 10 on the ladder of consensus families ranked by their largest chain's market cap |
| Consensus: family ladder | 10 | Proof of work: 10 of 10 on the ladder of families ranked by the combined market cap of their chains |
| Cryptocurrency Standards | 8.2 | group average, 3 of 6 measured |
| Properties (10 whitepaper checks) (Source) | 6.7 | 6 of 10 passed, 1 not yet measured source |
| Anyone can mint (permissionless) | ✓ | Proof-of-Useful-Work (AI GPU matrix-mult) |
| Limited supply | ✓ | fixed maximum of 2,100,000,000 |
| No pre-issuance or developer mint | ✓ | |
| No developer tax | ✓ | |
| No authority that can halt the chain or freeze funds | ✓ | Bitcoin-style UTXO chain with no freeze or admin key. |
| No central team | ✗ | Pearl Research Labs maintains pearld (a btcd-derived full node, ISC licence) in its monorepo. |
| Fees under one cent | – | |
| Payments safe to accept within seconds | ✗ | Bitcoin-style proof-of-work blocks about every 2.5-3 minutes; no zero-confirmation protection. |
| UTXO ledger | ✓ | |
| Privacy built into the protocol | ✗ | |
| Scalability (fees, throughput, block time, block space) | — | too few measures yet source |
| Fees ($0.001 or less 10, $1 or more 0) | – | not yet measured |
| Throughput (1,000 transactions a second or more 10) | – | not yet measured |
| Block time (10 minutes 10, less either side) | 8 | a block every 2.7 minutes |
| Block space per 10 minutes (32 MB or more 10) | – | not yet measured |
| Security (9 checks) | 8 | 8 of 9 passed source |
| Miners paid over $1 million a day | ✓ | about $1,594,864 a day |
| Miners paid over $100,000 a day | ✓ | |
| Its own hashrate: at least half its algorithm's largest, not merge-mined | ✓ | |
| Largest pool or validator under 50% | ✓ | 44.7% |
| Largest three under 75% | ✓ | 74.1% |
| More than one maintained client | ✗ | 1 |
| Node software is open source | ✓ | Pearl Research Labs maintains pearld (a btcd-derived full node, ISC licence) in its monorepo. |
| Real on-chain use: 1,000+ transactions a day | ✓ | about 6,493 a day |
| No 51% attack or deep reorganisation in five years | ✓ | |
| Decentralisation: who can mint (Source) | 10 | Proof of work: 10 of 10 on the ladder of who produces blocks |
| Decentralisation: nodes (Source) | — | Not yet counted |
| Decentralisation: holder concentration (Source) | — | Not yet measured |
| Capabilities (protocol features) | 3.3 | 2 of 6 passed source |
| Decentralisation | ||
| Network-level privacy: the node hides where a transaction came from (Dandelion++, Tor or I2P, on by default) | ✗ | pearld (btcd fork) relays transactions directly; Tor onion support is optional configuration. |
| Light clients verify payments from headers or proofs, without a trusted server | ✓ | Pearl monorepo ships an SPV light client using compact block filters (neutrino), mainnet since 27 Apr 2026. |
| Scalability | ||
| Pruned nodes: a full node can validate and drop old history | ✓ | pearld inherits btcd --prune, which deletes validated blocks above a size target. |
| Native payment channels or instant payments | ✗ | No payment-channel network or protocol-enforced instant payments. |
| Security | ||
| Hidden amounts (confidential transactions, RingCT, shielded pools, Mimblewimble) | ✗ | Bitcoin-style transparent transactions. |
| Hidden sender and receiver (ring signatures or zero-knowledge proofs, one-time or stealth addresses) | ✗ | No sender or receiver hiding. |
| Issuance | 10 | group average |
| Premine (allocated at launch) | 10 | 0% of today's supply allocated at launch to founders, a company, a foundation or investors. No genesis allocation reported: the project describes the 27 Apr 2026 launch as having no pre-mine or investor allocation, and every PRL (about 332M mined by 2 Oct 2026, cap 2.1B) enters circulation through block rewards. source |
| Fundraising | 10 | No sale of the coin source |
| Developer share (after launch) | 10 | No developer share: every new coin goes to the miners or validators who produce blocks. No protocol cut found: the project and independent write-ups describe mining as the only source of PRL, with nothing allocated to founders or investors in the reward code. The 20% fee on the official Pearl pool is a pool operator's charge, not a protocol share, and team mining at the low launch difficulty is undisclosed. source |
| Supply & Demand | 4.8 | group average |
| Supply & Demand (Source) | 3.9 | average of 6 measures |
| Exchanges (10 or more: 10) | 4 | 4 exchanges |
| Volume rank among the top 200 | 0 | $556,483 traded in 24 hours; #870 by volume on the exchanges the site reads (ranked on the median day of the last 2, $541,275) |
| Turnover (volume ÷ market cap, 5% a day: 10) | 0.2 | 0.07% of its market cap a day, median of the last 3 days |
| Order-book depth (bids and asks within 2% ÷ market cap, 1%: 10) | 2.1 | $25,187 within 2% of the price on 1 exchange, 0.00% of its market cap, median of the last 2 days |
| Market cap ($1M 0, $10B or more 10) | 6.9 | $577M, 6.9 on a scale of 2.5 points per tenfold |
| Futures exposure (open interest ÷ market cap, less is better) | 10 | no perpetual futures on the exchanges read |
| Supply (smaller is better) | 5.7 | fixed maximum supply of 2.1 billion |
| Record | 7.3 | group average |
| Record (origin, claims, halts) | 10 | 3 positive, 0 negative source |
| Positive record | ||
| Launched with a stated purpose, not as a joke | ✓ | |
| No claims by its founders that contradict its own design | ✓ | |
| No halt, freeze or reversal in five years | ✓ | |
| Age (years since genesis) (Source) | 6 | 6 full years since 2020-09-06, the first day with a recorded price (genesis not yet researched, so the age can only be understated). |
| Development (work, improvements, unfixed issues) | 6 | 1 positive, 0 negative, 4 not yet researched source |
| Positive | ||
| Steady work, 6 of 6 | ✓ | 212 commits in 7 of the last 12 months (github.com/pearl-research-labs/pearl); pearl v1.5.3, 21 Oct 2026 (mainnet since 27 Apr 2026; frequent releases). |
| Not yet researched | ||
| Shipped a security fix in two years | – | |
| Shipped a privacy improvement in two years | – | |
| Shipped a scaling upgrade in two years | – | |
| Shipped a new capability for users in two years | – | |
Seventeen criteria, weighted equally. The Cryptocurrency Standards group four parts: properties (ten checks drawn from the Bitcoin whitepaper), scalability (four measures), security (nine checks) and decentralisation (three scales). Provisional: criteria marked — are not yet measured and are left out of the average. A rating of structure and market depth, not a price forecast or investment advice. How the grade is built · Highest-graded cryptocurrencies.
360,845,432 of a maximum 2,100,000,000 PEARL are in circulation — 17.2% of the total that will ever exist.
| Premine (allocated at launch) | 0% of today's supply |
|---|---|
| Developer share received since launch | 0% of today's supply |
| Developer share of new coins today | 0% |
| Fundraising | No sale and no investor round |
No genesis allocation reported: the project describes the 27 Apr 2026 launch as having no pre-mine or investor allocation, and every PRL (about 332M mined by 2 Oct 2026, cap 2.1B) enters circulation through block rewards.
No token sale and no announced venture round for Pearl Research Labs; company funding and team PRL holdings are undisclosed.
No protocol cut found: the project and independent write-ups describe mining as the only source of PRL, with nothing allocated to founders or investors in the reward code. The 20% fee on the official Pearl pool is a pool operator's charge, not a protocol share, and team mining at the low launch difficulty is undisclosed.
Sources: datawallet.com · hashrateindex.com · parameter.io · github.com · pearlresearch.ai. Researched 2026-10-24, medium confidence.
Pearl is secured by 72 EH/s of its own work. Hashrate does not compare across algorithms — a SHA-256 hash and a Scrypt hash cost different amounts to produce.
No SEC/CFTC determination — unclassified.
The regulator's position, reported as stated, not CoinSpectrum's. Assets nobody has ruled on are left unclassified rather than sorted by a guess.
Pearl is #36 among cryptocurrencies and #97 in the market ranking, which lists wrapped coins, staked derivatives, stablecoins and tokens alongside them. CoinSpectrum counts an asset once, and counts only cryptocurrencies: assets with their own blockchain and their own consensus. A wrapped coin, a staked derivative or a stablecoin is a claim on something already counted; a token, memecoin or otherwise, runs on another chain's blocks. All of them are listed, each in its own section, and none is added to the total. The 61 places between Pearl's two ranks are held by claims and tokens, not by other networks. The methodology sets out the rule and the counting rule argues for it.
The price above is the median of the exchanges the site reads live, checked every minute and cross-checked against a market snapshot (how market data is gathered). The grade is scored on published criteria, each with its source (the method). The site is independent, nothing on it is a paid placement, and its statements are signed (about CoinSpectrum, the manifesto).