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 economics are marginal at current PRL prices ($0.76), with ROI ranging from -1% to +67% depending on GPU tier -- near breakeven for most hardware; 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作为获得AI行业高层背书的Layer-1区块链，宣称其有用工作量证明（PoUW）协议能在保障网络安全的同时执行AI推理。我们首次对已部署的PoUW系统进行系统性实证测量，发现相当于约32万GPU等效算力、消耗约112兆瓦电力的Pearl 24 EH/s网络，实际产生的有用AI计算量为零。自挖矿软件公开发布后，GPU租赁价格上涨38%，利用率从57%激增至94%，挤占了合法研究负载。我们的测量涵盖五个维度：（1）对8012个矿工的网络构成分析显示，所有矿工均配备可推理硬件，但主流挖矿软件不含任何推理代码；（2）验证协议在设计上接受随机矩阵，我们开源的矿工在NVIDIA、AMD、CPU和Apple Silicon硬件上提交的44个矿池有效份额已证实此问题；（3）对抗性高斯采样可轻易绕过统计分布校验；（4）按当前PRL币价（0.76美元）计算的挖矿经济边际收益为：不同GPU层级的投资回报率介于-1%至+67%之间，对大多数硬件而言接近保本；（5）挖矿计算本质为通用整数运算，可移植至任何硬件平台，无法形成供应商锁定。这些发现量化了Leinweber等人理论识别的可验证性与有用性之间的张力，提供了部署系统中该张力程度及其经济影响的具体测量数据。