PEARL is live on near.com, the first confidential venue for PEARL. Pearl’s Proof of Useful Work protocol is designed to let GPUs run AI workloads while producing the proofs that secure the network and issue PEARL.
While the protocol defines how PEARL is created, until now, there has been little infrastructure for what happens to it next. The GPU operators who mine PEARL pay for electricity, hardware, and payroll in other currencies, and a token confined to its native network has no direct path to the chains and stablecoins where those costs are settled. near.com, powered by NEAR Intents, finally gives PEARL that market. Traders and miners can swap into and out of PEARL from supported assets across 35+ chains in one interface, with every trade confidential by default.
Trade PEARL on near.com today →
When AI Compute Becomes an Onchain Asset
The arithmetic underneath every large language model, in training and in inference, is matrix multiplication. The data centers being built right now are, at the level of the chip, enormous rooms for multiplying matrices.
Pearl's Proof of Useful Work protocol is designed to let GPUs run those same AI workloads while producing the proofs that secure a blockchain and issue its native currency, PEARL. The ambition is to make the work of securing a chain the same work that powers AI, so that each PEARL is a receipt for computation that was also useful to someone.
It is a new answer to where an asset comes from, and it is why PEARL has drawn attention across crypto and AI.
How NEAR Intents Connects PEARL to the Cross-Chain Market
An asset becomes useful when it can reach the people, apps, and markets that want it. For a younger network like Pearl, that means three things: access to liquidity on other chains, a way into the wallets and apps people already use, and a way out for holders whose costs aren’t paid in PEARL.
The usual answer is a patchwork: a listing here, a bridge there, a wrapped version of the token on each chain that wants one. Every piece adds a step for the user and a dependency for the network.
NEAR Intents works differently. A user, or an agent acting for one, states what they want: this asset, on that chain, at no worse than this price. A network of solvers competes to fill it. Nobody picks a route or touches a bridge. That is why the same rail that serves a person swapping on near.com can serve an agent settling a thousand small payments an hour.
For Pearl, that means one integration instead of many. PEARL is now live on NEAR Intents, so PEARL can reach every chain and app that already supports Intents, and every asset on those chains can reach Pearl.
Two Ways to Access PEARL
On near.com. Swap supported assets from other chains into PEARL, or move PEARL out to the wider onchain economy, from one interface. near.com has been confidential by default since September, so these swaps happen out of public view.
Through the NEAR Intents 1Click API. Wallets, apps, and other integration partners that already use NEAR Intents would be able to offer PEARL cross-chain swaps through the integration they already have. For a developer, Pearl becomes one more supported asset on the same API, with no new integration work required.
Why New Assets Like PEARL Start on near.com
New assets have usually waited for a centralized exchange listing before most traders could reach them. PEARL is taking the path QTC, the native asset of the Quantus network, took before it. It is available first on near.com, and through NEAR Intents it connects to liquidity on every chain Intents supports from day one of trading.
Today, an asset born from AI work can now reach the markets where people and agents already transact.
For PEARL, those markets matter most to the people who mine it. Most are operators of GPU capacity, people and companies whose costs are denominated in electricity, hardware leases, and payroll, none of which are paid in PEARL. On near.com that distance closes: they can convert PEARL into stablecoins on whatever chain the bills get paid from, without broadcasting the trade.
The same access extends to agents. An agent buying inference could pay in PEARL, or in USDC, or in whatever its counterparty prefers, and let solvers handle the conversion. An agent that earns PEARL by contributing compute could route part of it into whatever asset its owner prefers, on whatever chain, under limits the owner set in advance. Neither has to ask which chain the asset lives on. That is the problem NEAR Intents was built to remove.
Proof of Useful Work is a young idea and Pearl is a young network. What it needed first was a way to reach everything else. It now has that reach through NEAR.
