Pearl, a Layer-1 blockchain with high-profile AI industry endorsements, markets its Proof-of-Useful-Work (PoUW) protocol as simultaneously securing the network and performing AI inference. We present the first systematic empirical measurement of a deployed PoUW system, finding that Pearl's 24 EH/s network -- representing approximately 320,000 GPU-equivalents consuming an estimated 112 MW -- produces zero useful AI computation. Budget GPU rental prices rose 38% and utilization surged from 57% to 94% following the mining software's public release, displacing legitimate research workloads. Our measurements span five dimensions: (1) network composition analysis of 8,012 workers shows all have inference-capable hardware, yet the dominant mining software contains no inference code; (2) the verification protocol accepts random matrices by design, confirmed by 44 pool-accepted shares from our open-source miner across NVIDIA, AMD, CPU, and Apple Silicon hardware; (3) statistical distribution checks are trivially defeated by adversarial Gaussian sampling; (4) mining is unprofitable at current PRL prices ($0.21) across all GPU tiers (-54% to -72% ROI); and (5) the mining computation is commodity integer arithmetic portable to any hardware platform, offering no vendor lock-in. These findings quantify the verifiability-usefulness tension identified theoretically by Leinweber et al., providing concrete measurements of its magnitude and economic consequences in a deployed system.

翻译：Pearl，一条拥有知名AI行业背书的Layer-1区块链，将其“有用工作量证明”协议同时宣传为保障网络安全和执行AI推理的手段。我们首次对一个已部署的PoUW系统进行了系统性实证测量，发现Pearl 24 EH/s的网络——相当于约32万个等效GPU，消耗约112兆瓦电力——产生了零个有用的AI计算。在挖矿软件公开发布后，廉价GPU租赁价格上涨38%，利用率从57%飙升至94%，挤占了合法的研究工作负载。我们的测量涵盖五个维度：(1) 对8012个工人的网络组成分析显示，所有硬件均具备推理能力，但主流挖矿软件不包含任何推理代码；(2) 验证协议设计上接受随机矩阵，我们开源的挖矿机在NVIDIA、AMD、CPU和Apple Silicon硬件上提交的44个经矿池接受的份额证实了这一点；(3) 对抗性高斯采样可轻易击败统计分布检查；(4) 在当前的PRL价格（0.21美元）下，所有GPU级别的挖矿均无利可图（ROI为-54%至-72%）；(5) 挖矿计算为通用整数算术运算，可移植到任何硬件平台，不存在供应商锁定。这些发现量化了Leinweber等人理论上指出的可验证性与有用性之间的张力，并提供了在一套已部署系统中其规模及经济后果的具体测量数据。