
Pearl MoE Hard Fork goes live, introducing v2 certificates, MoE workloads, and mandatory node upgrades across the network.
Author: Akshay
12th June 2026 – The Pearl MoE hard fork went live early on June 12. The upgrade moves the network from v1 certificates to new v2 certificates built around Mixture-of-Experts workloads.
High Signal Summary For A Quick Glance
Dan Bulmer
@danbulmer70
@prlnet As a matter of fact. Tell us how we can host a node!
The MoE hard fork is now live. Update now! This upgrade marks the next phase of the Pearl network. With this hard fork, Pearl transitions to v2 certificates based on Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) workloads, enabling the network to more accurately verify and reward useful AI
09:04 AM·Jun 12, 2026
Neo
@timerringX
@prlnet Congrats! MoE workload is a huge progress.
The MoE hard fork is now live. Update now! This upgrade marks the next phase of the Pearl network. With this hard fork, Pearl transitions to v2 certificates based on Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) workloads, enabling the network to more accurately verify and reward useful AI
06:59 AM·Jun 12, 2026
GMT Maxi
@GMTMAXI
@prlnet Congrats to the team👏🏻
The MoE hard fork is now live. Update now! This upgrade marks the next phase of the Pearl network. With this hard fork, Pearl transitions to v2 certificates based on Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) workloads, enabling the network to more accurately verify and reward useful AI
06:52 AM·Jun 12, 2026
Steady attention without excessive speculation.
Pearl Research Labs announced the upgrade on X at roughly 06:51 UTC. According to the team, the fork is already active. Node operators must update now or get left on an incompatible chain.
The core change is the certificate format. Pearl is a Proof-of-Useful-Work chain. A certificate is the verifiable proof that a miner did real compute.
Until now, miners produced v1 certificates. These covered exact integer matrix multiplication, or MatMul, run on perturbed inputs. The official announcement says v2 certificates instead support Mixture-of-Experts, or MoE, workloads.
MoE is a common AI model design. Instead of running every input through one giant network, the model routes each input to specialized “expert” sub-networks. As a result, only part of the model activates at a time.
According to Pearl, v2 will “more accurately verify and reward useful AI computation.” The goal is simple. Tie mining rewards to genuine AI work, not arbitrary math.
The Pearl MoE hard fork rewrites the rules for valid blocks. Because of that, old software cannot validate the new v2 certificates.
The upgrade call asks operators to run pearld v1.1.0 and wallet v2.0.0. The wallet release bundles the fork logic through pull request #173 on the project’s GitHub releases page.
Nodes that skip the update will follow the old ruleset. Therefore they will split off from the canonical chain. For miners, that means lost rewards until they upgrade.
Timeline: Pearl Network’s progression from its original Proof-of-Useful-Work certificate model to the Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) certificate architecture
Pearl Research releases its whitepaper and supporting research describing v1 certificates, which use exact integer matrix multiplication on noised inputs verified through Plonky2 zkSNARKs as Proof-of-Useful-Work.
The Bitcoin-forked Layer-1 network goes live with v1 certificates, GPU-powered MatMul mining, native PRL issuance, node software, miner plugins, and initial AI model support.
Pearl unveils its first major commercial integration, using Pearl emissions to subsidize AI inference endpoints through Together AI infrastructure.
Mining profitability attracts significant GPU participation across the network before gradually normalizing as difficulty levels rise and rewards become more competitive.
Pearl publishes Desktop Wallet v2.0.0 on GitHub. The release includes explicit “MoE fork changes,” preparing users and node operators for the upcoming consensus upgrade while adding macOS support.
Pearl officially announces that the MoE hard fork is live. The network begins transitioning from v1 MatMul certificates to v2 certificates based on Mixture-of-Experts workloads, requiring upgrades to pearld v1.1.0 and Wallet v2.0.0.
Node operators, miners, and participants enter the active upgrade phase. Non-upgraded nodes risk diverging from the canonical chain as the new certificate ruleset becomes active.
The network is expected to begin producing and validating blocks containing Mixture-of-Experts-based v2 certificates as upgraded miners and validators dominate network participation.
Pearl is expected to complete network-wide adoption of v2 certificates, potentially accompanied by additional technical specifications, implementation details, and formal documentation covering the upgraded architecture.
Pearl is a Bitcoin fork, but it does not use SHA-256 hashing. Instead, miners run large matrix multiplications on Nvidia GPUs. These are the same operations that power AI training and inference.
The design traces back to a 2025 paper, “Proofs of Useful Work from Arbitrary Matrix Multiplication.” Pearl CEO Omri Weinstein co-authored it. At mainnet launch on April 27, the team shipped a vLLM miner plugin so GPU owners could join.
Each miner commits to input matrices, adds controlled low-rank noise, then computes the noised MatMul. Next the miner generates a zkSNARK proof using Plonky2. Hash conditions must also meet network difficulty.
Verifiers check the proof without rerunning the full computation. So the network confirms the work happened and then pays the miner in PRL. Pearl calls this a “2-for-1” model, where security and useful compute come together.
The shift to MoE is about reward accuracy. Under generic MatMul, a miner could pick convenient matrices. Those matrices are easy to compute but not tied to any real model.
MoE-structured workloads are harder to fake. The work mirrors actual sparse model inference. So Pearl argues v2 certificates can reward compute that maps to productive AI tasks.
Still, the exact technical spec for v2 is not yet public. The whitepaper details the v1 MatMul design. Detailed v2 documentation has not surfaced, so the announcement remains the main source.
PRL traded near $0.509 around the time of the fork, according to CoinGecko data. The 24-hour change sat near flat. The 7-day change showed a drop of roughly 33%.
Daily volume was modest at about $591,000, which points to thin liquidity. PRL carries a max supply of 2.1 billion coins. Trackers do not yet report full circulating supply. Third-party sites put network hashrate near 28 EH/s in early June.
So far no tier-1 outlet such as CoinDesk or The Block has covered the fork. The event is only hours old, so broader market reaction may still develop. None of this is financial advice.
Pearl has its doubters. A recent arXiv paper studied Pearl’s cuPOW protocol. A Hacker News thread joined in. Both question how much real AI inference the network actually performs.
Critics argue that miners may still favor convenient matrices over genuine workloads. Some also note that Together AI, Pearl’s inference partner since May 15, reportedly subsidizes its own inference separately.
Pearl frames v2 as a direct answer to that critique. Whether MoE certificates close the gap between claimed and actual useful work remains an open question for now.
The Pearl MoE hard fork is the network’s first major upgrade since mainnet. The immediate task is adoption. Pearl needs miners and node operators to move to v1.1.0 quickly. Clean upgrades will decide how smooth the transition feels.
Several details are still unconfirmed. Pearl has not published the exact fork activation block height. Post-fork node counts and any v2 security audit also remain unclear.
Miners can track new blocks on the Pearl block explorer as v2 certificates roll in. Pearl built its pitch on the promise of useful AI compute. This fork is the first real test of that thesis.
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