You do not need to own a GPU to mine Pearl (PEARL). Cloud GPU marketplaces rent everything from an RTX 5090 to an H100 by the hour, and Pearl’s mining software runs on them the same way it runs at home. Renting changes the maths, though: you pay a fixed hourly price instead of a power bill, and with Pearl’s FP8 fork on the horizon, which card you rent matters more than usual. This guide covers both, as of November 5, 2026.
How mining on a rented GPU works
- Rent a machine on a GPU marketplace. vast.ai and Runpod are two well-known options. Prices change constantly with demand, so check them live rather than trusting any number in a guide.
- Install a miner that your pool supports and that is current with the latest network rules. Our how to mine Pearl guide walks through the software.
- Point it at a pool and set the payout to your own Pearl address. See Pearl mining pools compared.
- Watch earnings against the hourly rent and stop the rental when the numbers stop working.
Pearl Research also offers a managed route: mining plans sold through Pearl Compute, and an official pool that accepts H100 and H200 GPUs only, with a 20% fee.
The profit formula for rented GPUs
At home, electricity is your main running cost. On a rental, it is the hourly price:
profit = (PEARL earned × PEARL price) − rent − pool fee
PEARL earned depends on your card’s hashrate, the network difficulty and how fast blocks are arriving, all of which move. Difficulty adjusts every block, so new hashrate on the network shows up in your earnings within days. See Pearl block time and difficulty for how that works and Pearl mining profitability for the full set of inputs.
Hashrates for common rental GPUs
Pearl hashrate is measured in TH/s, meaning tera matrix multiplications per second. Figures below come from AlphaMine (May 2026) and Kryptex. Each miner instance needs about 2 GB of VRAM, according to AlphaMine.
| GPU | Architecture | Hashrate (TH/s) | After FP8 fork as written |
|---|---|---|---|
| RTX 5090 | Blackwell | About 220 (Kryptex) | Keeps mining |
| RTX 5080 | Blackwell | About 105 | Keeps mining |
| RTX 4090 | Ada | 150 to 160 | Stops (not listed) |
| RTX 3090 | Ampere | About 90 | Stops (no FP8) |
| RTX 3070 | Ampere | 50 to 60 | Stops (no FP8) |
| H100, H200 | Hopper | Check your pool | Keeps mining |
| B200 | Blackwell | Check your pool | Keeps mining |
| L40S, L4 | Ada | Check your pool | Stops (not listed) |
| A100 | Ampere | Check your pool | Stops (no FP8) |
For more cards and how to compare them, see the best GPUs for Pearl mining.
Why the FP8 fork favors Hopper and Blackwell rentals
Today Pearl mining uses integer math (INT7 × INT7 into INT32), which almost any modern Nvidia GPU can do. PIP-3 proposes moving to FP8 floating point. Because different hardware gives bitwise-different FP8 results, the miner must declare its hardware and the verifier reproduces the work exactly on that hardware. The spec as written whitelists two device types: Hopper and Blackwell. At activation, the new certificate version becomes mandatory and the old integer versions are rejected.
What that means for renters:
- Hopper (H100, H200) and Blackwell (B200, RTX 5090 and the rest of the RTX 50 series) keep mining if the fork activates as written. Kryptex reports the founders confirmed the RTX 5090 and RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell will keep mining.
- Ada (RTX 4090, L40S, L4) has FP8 hardware but is not in the spec’s device list. An open community PR (#16) asks to add Ada devices and activate them together with PIP-3, but it is not merged.
- Ampere and older (A100, RTX 30 series) have no FP8 tensor cores, so they would stop mining Pearl after the fork.
Timing is open. PIP-3 is a Draft, a PR to promote it to Proposed is still open, and no activation height is set. The founders said at a September 15 AMA, according to Kryptex, that they will fork only once confident in the security. Until activation, every card that mines today keeps mining. Our GPU checker for the FP8 fork lists more models.
Practical tips for renting
- Keep commitments short. Hourly or short-term rentals let you react to difficulty, price and protocol changes.
- Check the pool supports the card. The official pool takes only H100 and H200. Community pools vary.
- Verify the miner version. Pearl has changed mining rules through hard forks before, for example the August 2026 salted noise-seed fork, and pearld 1.5.0 was a security release that asked miners and pools to upgrade first. Check the official releases page.
- Never put your seed phrase on a rented machine. Set the payout to your own prl1p address from a wallet on a device you control. Oyster’s miner mode gives you one fixed payout address for this; see the mining docs and the mining payout wallet guide.
- Watch the PIPs repository. Fork news lands at github.com/pearl-research-labs/pips first. See how Pearl Improvement Proposals work.
Once PEARL lands in your wallet, you can hold it or sell it. See how to sell PEARL, and stay clear of copycat tokens with our guide to Pearl scams and fake tokens.
Frequently asked questions
Can I mine Pearl on a rented cloud GPU?
Yes. Pearl mining runs on ordinary Nvidia GPUs, so a rented machine from a GPU marketplace such as vast.ai or Runpod can mine like a card at home. You pay the rental price per hour instead of electricity, so profit is PEARL earned times the PEARL price, minus rent and pool fees.
Which rented GPUs are safest for Pearl mining?
If the FP8 fork (PIP-3) activates as currently written, only Hopper and Blackwell GPUs keep mining: for example H100, H200, B200 and the RTX 5090. Ada cards such as the RTX 4090 and L40S, and Ampere cards such as the A100, would stop. PIP-3 is still a Draft with no activation height as of November 5, 2026.
Does the official Pearl pool accept rented GPUs?
The official Pearl Research pool supports H100 and H200 GPUs only and charges a 20% fee. Community pools support consumer cards. Pearl Research also sells mining plans through Pearl Compute.
Is it safe to put my wallet on a rented machine?
Do not put your seed phrase on a rented machine. A miner only needs a payout address. Set the pool payout to your own prl1p address from a wallet on a device you control, so the rented box never holds keys.
