(Image credit: @I_Leak_VN via X.com)

A new research preprint claims that Pearl, a Layer-1 blockchain marketed as turning cryptocurrency mining into useful artificial intelligence (AI) computation, is doing nothing of the sort, despite having recently triggered a GPU mining rush . The study estimates Pearl's network runs at roughly 24 exahashes per second (EH/s) — the equivalent of about 320,000 RTX 3090-class GPUs drawing an estimated 112 megawatts (MW) — all while producing "zero useful AI computation." Researchers saw a roughly 38% jump in budget GPU rental prices on the marketplace vast.ai go to Pearl mining, with utilization climbing from 57% to 94% after the mining software went public in May.

Instead of performing real inference or training, the paper, titled The Usefulness Gap in Proof-of-Useful-Work , says the network grinds through random matrix multiplications that merely take the shape of AI math.…