New AI-compute cryptocurrency Pearl sparks a GPU mining rush but profitability is already sliding — RTX 5090 daily revenue has halved to $17.19 since April

A new cryptocurrency named Pearl, utilizing AI workloads for blockchain security, has led to a surge in GPU mining activity, with an RTX 5090's daily revenue dropping to $17.19 from $33.80 since April. The coin's mainnet launch in April 2026 attracted attention after an exclusive partnership announcement with AI cloud provider Together AI. Despite the initial hype, PRL's price and mining profitability are declining as more miners join the network. The consensus mechanism, Proof-of-Useful-Work, involves large-scale matrix multiplication, a key component of AI training and inference. Mining is limited to Nvidia hardware, and most activity has been on rented cloud capacity, impacting per-card payouts as network difficulty rises.